Quotes About Poetry

In these days of our new materialistic Irish state, poetry will have a harder, less picturesque task. But the loss of Yeats and all that boundless activity, in a country where the mind is feared and avoided, leaves a silence which it is painful to contemplate.

I have a taste for ghazals and I like them.

People think of poetry as a school subject... Poetry is very frustrating to students because they don't have a taste for ambiguity, for one thing. That gives them a poetry hangover.

I've always felt that poetry was particularly erotic, more than prose was... I say that you read poems not with your eyes and not with your ears, but with your mouth. You taste it.

I go to the gym, do some martial arts, and I love poetry. I have a tattoo of my family crest, and another on my back that says 'The Road Not Taken,' which is a poem by Robert Frost.

The Bible should be taught, but emphatically not as reality. It is fiction, myth, poetry, anything but reality. As such it needs to be taught because it underlies so much of our literature and our culture.

I didn't start writing songs, honestly, until I started making my album. I was always doing poetry, but I never thought I could write songs. I discouraged myself and thought it was so hard. But starting this process and learning just what it is to be a songwriter and performer taught me that you don't have to feel discouraged about anything.

I like cups of tea and reading books and poetry and old people things.

It's after dark that I feel most inspired, I'm a nocturnal creature. I'll write poetry or streams of consciousness, play instruments, or teach myself to DJ by doing a silent solo set.

Well you can't teach the poetry, but you can teach the craft.

I taught high school English for 24 years. I always teach my students to appreciate the beauty of language and to write poetically.

I've always written. When I was in school, the only teacher who ever liked me was my creative writing teacher. I used to enter poetry competitions, and I don't think I ever lost one. So I had the idea for a while of being some kind of poet.

I've always been - as a teacher, as graduate student, as a student, and I think, really, as a child - I've been interested in poems, but not so much for what the take home pay is, what you might sum up from them in moral or intellectual terms or whatever, but what's in the certain lines and how lines relates to other lines.

If you've ever been to a poetry slam, you know that the highest scoring emotion is self-righteous indignation: how dare you judge me. So in that way, the poem, 'What Teachers Make,' is an absolutely formulaic slam poem designed to allow me to get up on my soap box and say, 'Let me tell you what really makes me angry.'

In school I was sidelined by Tamil language teachers. But in the film industry, I got interested in Tamil poetry after reading and working with the Vairamuthu.

Instead of trying to come up and pontificate on what literature is, you need to talk with children, to teachers, and make sure they get poetry in the curriculum early.

I met Seamus Heaney and Michael Longley on the same day in 1968. I was sixteen at the time. Very exciting. They were reading at Armagh. One of my teachers brought me to meet them, introduced me, and I became friends with them.

I read poetry every day. I look at it as an exercise, a kind of T'ai Chi for writers. It teaches economy of form.

What a great poem teaches you - and it's not intellectual at all - is the resonance in the language that's heard there. This goes back to the very origins of poetry and to the very origins of language.

I would go to the store, I would buy cassette tapes, and I would read the liner notes and sort of subconsciously creating the connections between the rappers that I was reading and the poets that they were teaching us in school.

The best argument for teaching poetry is to put a three-year-old or a four-year-old and read Dr. Seuss, or Robert Louis Stevenson, and to feel how the child and you are engaging in something that's really basic to the animal, which is passing on in these rhythmic ways, something that came from somewhere.

Teaching writing over the years intrudes on your own writing in important ways, taking away some of the excitement of poetry.

I learned to impersonate the kind of person that talks about poetry. It comes from teaching, I think.

Early in my teaching days, the kids asked me the meaning of a poem. I replied, 'I don't know any more than you do. I have ideas. What are your ideas?' I realized then that we're all in the same boat. What does anybody know?