Quotes About Poetry

I definitely wish to distinguish American poetry from British or other English language poetry.

Still, language is resilient, and poetry when it is pressured simply goes underground.

I'm perfectly happy when I look out at an audience and it's all women. I always think it's kind of odd, but then, more women than men, I think, read and write poetry.

PC stuff just lowers the general acceptance of good work and replaces it with bogus poetry that celebrates values that in themselves are probably quite worthy.

But I am not political in the current events sense, and I have never wanted anyone to read my poetry that way.

But I don't think that poetry is a good, to use a contemporary word, venue, for current events.

Because, in fact, women, feminists, do read my poetry, and they read it often with the power of their political interpretation. I don't care that's what poetry is supposed to do.

From reading a previous answer, you know that I consider all those aspects to be part of American cultural myth and thus they figure into good American poetry, whether the poet is aware of what he is doing or not.

Poetry is the art of saying what you mean but disguising it.

dance floors would bleed from the knife of her dress

But Blake's voices returned to dictate revisions.

Poetry gives the griever not release from grief but companionship in grief. Poetry embodies the complexity of feelings at their most intense and entangled, and therefore offers . . . the company of tears.

The growth of poetry is a counterforce--and a response--to our culture of numbers and information, of digits and commerce. We read and write poems so that our psyches can speak to each other with intelligence in the language of feeling, acknowledging the multiplicity and contradiction of each human life.

In 2013 there were 7,427 poetry readings in April, many on a Thursday. For anyone born in 1928 who pays attention to poetry, the numerousness is astonishing. In April 1948, there were 15 readings in the United States, 12 by Robert Frost. So I claim. The figures are imaginary, but you get the point.

Come back now and help me with these verses. Whisper to me some beautiful secret that you remember from life.

There is the view that poetry should improve your life. I think people confuse it with the Salvation Army.

I think that things are poetic when they don't have a boundary. Without rules. My life is poetic.

I would like a simple life / yet all night I am laying / poems away in a long box.

When gloaming treads the heels of day And birds sit cowering on the spray, Along the flowery hedge I stray, To meet mine ain dear somebody.

You can find poetry in your everyday life, your memory, in what people say on the bus, in the news, or just what's in your heart.

The wild hawk to the wind-swept sky The deer to the wholesome wold; And the heart of a man to the heart of a maid, As it was in the days of old.

Above the forest of the parakeets, A parakeet of parakeets prevails, A pip of life amid a mort of tails.

There is a silence where hath been no sound, There is a silence where no sound may be,- In the cold grave, under the deep, deep sea, Or in the wide desert where no life is found.

I only said I loved you in my poetry.