Quotes About Poetry

I'm a real big fan of words.

Poetry has, in a way, been my bridge to my acting career.

I think Gil Scott-Heron is a king. He's a brilliant, broken king.

Any long work in which poetry is persistent, be it epic or drama or narrative, is really a succession of separate poetic experiences governed into a related whole by an energy distinct from that which evoked them.

To feel most beautifully alive means to be reading something beautiful, ready always to apprehend in the flow of language the sudden flash of poetry.

When I'm in certain moods, a conversation will start up in my head, and suddenly I'll realize that the language has reached a very high and interesting level, and then lines and stanzas will just kind of appear, full-blown.

I'm a political poet - let us say a 'human' poet, a poet that's concerned with the plight of people who suffer. If words can be of assistance, then that's what I'm going to use.

Poetry is that sentiment of the soul, or faculty of the mind, which enables its possessor to appreciate and realize the heights and depths of human experience. It is the power to feel pleasure or suffer pain in all its exquisiteness and intensity.

A person who's only suffering can't write a poem. There are choices to be made, and you need to be objective.

The Italian word 'stanza' means 'a room', and a room is a good way to conceive of a stanza. A room, generally speaking, is sufficient for its own purposes, but it does not constitute a house. A stanza has the same sense of containment, without being complete or independent.

My own journey in becoming a poet began with memory - with the need to record and hold on to what was being lost. One of my earliest poems, 'Give and Take,' was about my Aunt Sugar, how I was losing her to her memory loss.

The craftless anarchy of the Beat poets on the one hand, and the extreme control of Henry James on the other, suggest that for most human beings, just as both freedom and discipline are necessary in life, serendipity and design must coexist in a work to make it readable.

Granted, I'm someone who loves words. I've always loved poetry - so it's suited to me.

Most of my songs are based off poetry, but I mainly write to write. I never know which form the words are best suited to until I hear an instrumental.

My strong suits, coming from poetry, will naturally be description, which I love doing. It comes very easily, and possibly structure, up to a point.

My obsession with time informs my poetry so completely it is hard for me to summarize it. We want time to pass, for new things to happen to us, we want to hold on to certain moments, we don't want our lives to end.

Sunday is a likely day to write a poem. Because poetry is a piece of language flying around: you'll find notebooks, something on your phone. It's about finding them and getting them off that crumpled piece of paper and onto my computer.

Sonnets are guys writing in English, imitating an Italian song form. It was a form definitely sung as often as it was recited.

I think the first time I really heard poetry was in the schoolyard. Just the little limericks that kids say when they're jumping rope and playing games. I think that's the first time I heard rhyming words - I don't know if I'd call that the definitive poetry, but that's when I heard rhyming words said and not necessarily sung.

A song is a short composition for voice and instruments. It is a piece of sung poetry set to music. It is usually only a few minutes long.

We all know what it means to be sung to. And poetry is very close to that.

Girls, there are poets who learn from you to say, what you, in your aloneness, are; and they learn through you to live distantness, as the evenings through the great stars become accustomed to eternity.

To make myself understood and to diminish the distance between us, I called out: "I am an evening cloud too." They stopped still, evidently taking a good look at me. Then they stretched towards me their fine, transparent, rosy wings. That is how evening clouds greet each other. They had recognized me.

Swells, Marina? we ocean, depths, Marina? we sky!