Quotes About Poetry

Since the age of 11, I have loved writing poems and fragments from my life.

I had been writing poems and stories since I learned to make letters. I had placed poems in a hardcover anthology at the age of 6. And I knew more big words than anyone else in the 10th grade.

I don't think I've ever written a poem whose intention was just to be funny. I've written poems that start out funny and often shift into something more serious.

I'm all for poetry catching up with technology, and just as there are iTunes, I think we should have iPoems. I mean, people should be able to walk around with their earbuds in and listening to poems on their iPod.

With fiction, I tend to get to my desk and start writing. Poetry I write in my head, often while walking, so that my poems have an organic quality, hopefully.

I've been interested in LeRoi Jones/Amiri Baraka's work for quite a while. My first introduction to LeRoi Jones was when my mother used to read me the 'Dead Lecturer' poems when I was a kid.

I love my funny poems, but I'd rather break your heart. And if I can do both in the same poem, that's the best.

I really just love reading. It's my favorite thing, performing my poems live. Reading by reading, I just kind of follow my nose.

I'm trying to make the poems as musical as I can - from the inception. So that whether they're read on the page, or people read them aloud, or I read them aloud, the musicality will be kind of a given.

My intention is to write poems. That's what I've been doing most of my life.

Poems, novels - these things belong to the nation, to the culture, and the people.

My poems are always about my life in one way or another.

I write poems, I meditate. I don't live up to people's expectations. I don't do the conventional cool things - I know I am the coolest person.

The headmaster asked to read one of my poems at some celebration or other when I was about 10. When I look back, that is phenomenal encouragement.

A lot of my activity in the theatre, and even in writing poems, was a kind of retrospective aggro on the English teacher who wouldn't allow me to read poetry aloud.

You litter poems with too much learning when you're younger.

I was living in Britain and then America, but it wasn't until I returned to live in Ireland in the late '70s that I really became aware of Seamus Heaney. I discovered quickly that his poems are very accessible.

If you sit down to write a limerick, you find yourself straddling two histories: the history of the limerick form itself, which stretches back to at least the 11th century, and your personal history of knowing limericks or poems similar to limericks.

I read Rumi, the 13th-century Persian poet, every day.

The lunatic, the lover, and the poet, are of imagination all compact.

I am a guest of the French language. My poems in French are born of my interaction with the French language, which is not the same as that of a French poet.

I am not less poet; I am more conscious of all that I am, am not, and might become.

The aim of the poet, or other artist, is first to make something; and it's impossible to make something out of words and not communicate.

In a way you can feel that the poet actually is looking over your shoulder, and you say to yourself, now, how would this go for him? Would this do or not?