Quotes About Poetry

One does not read a poem by Gwendolyn Brooks with hopes that it will grant him a career in engineering; he does so because poetry helps him see something in the world that he might not have seen before.

I want the poem to be an experience - for both the listener and for myself.

In many ways, I feel like the form carries so much of the weight in a poem, obviously. But I think we sometimes forget that.

Traditional paintings have few figures in them and value negative space. Japanese calligraphy and brush paintings are in black and white. Haiku is the shortest poem form in the world. These are a few examples of a minimalistic aesthetic in Japanese art and culture.

The main thing a poem ought to be is musical. It should be rhythmic. You should hear it as a musical piece in your head as you're writing it.

More than 700 years ago, the Song Dynasty artist Zheng Sixiao created perhaps the most beautiful image of orchids ever painted, 'Ink Orchid.' And still famous today is a thousand-year-old poem from the Tang Dynasty called 'Orchid and Orange.'

I can write a poem in 10 minutes. I like writing songs; I can write songs in 5 or 10 minutes. My concentration seems very short.

You pass a poem to the audience through the words as embodied literally by the rest of your human form. And the people listening and watching come back at you in an equally embodied way.

I like Beethoven, especially the poems.

Poems are not read: they are reread. Reread the poem, then read between the lines, then look at it, then watch it, then peek at it: handle it like an object. Contemplate its shadows, angles and dimensions.

If someone is alone reading my poems, I hope it would be like reading someone's notebook. A record. Of a place, beauty, difficulty. A familiar daily struggle.

Poems are a form of music, and language just happens to be our instrument - language and breath.

I think my poems immediately come out of the sensuous and emotional experiences I have.

The idea is to take the most ordinary things and make them extraordinary, as Gerard Manley Hopkins does in his poems.

Looking across the many strands of poetry, we can never be certain which poems were only read in private and which were performed - and there are thousands of poems which were performed but never got written down.

The animal encounter poem is now so distinct a genre that it would be possible to create a full-length anthology from deer encounter poems alone, and many varieties of experience would emerge from such an exercise.

I write short phrases and used to think they were poems!

I got $30 from Nation magazine for a poem and $500 for my first book of poems.

I work on words quite separately to music. They're both ongoing, and I don't ever feel like I'm working in a cycle in that respect, because it's every day anyway, no matter what I'm doing. Then I get to a point when I've collected together enough words that seem like they want to be songs rather than poems, or sometimes not.

I've always wanted to write poems and nothing else.

There must of course be a relationship between translating and making poems of your own, but what it is I just don't know.

There's not too much difference between writing a picture book and writing a collection of a hundred poems or so, except that the bigger books take a lot longer to do.

I started writing poems on a Xanga page. I always loved writing. I also had a Deviant Art page, actually, because my crush had one, too.

As a friendly one. I would still like to write concrete poems, but I can only do it sometimes.