Quotes About Poetry

Conversation may be compared to a lyre with seven chords - philosophy, art, poetry, love, scandal, and the weather.

I don't write poetry when I wish, I write when I can't, when my larynx is flooded and my throat is shut.

My poems are more my silence than my speech. Just as music is a kind of quiet. Sounds are needed only to unveil the various layers of silence.

The way a source strains toward the light, toward the air. Its laboring work, its effort, its black passageways like despair. That's the way a poet looks for words. With muscles, gestures.

There is little premium in poetry in a world that thinks of Pound and Whitman as a weight and a sampler, not an Ezra, a Walt, a thing of beauty, a joy forever.

I am obnoxious to each carping tongueWho says my hand a needle better fits,A poet's pen all scorn I should thus wrong,For such despite they cast on female wits:If what I do prove well, it won't advance,They'll say it's stol'n, or else it was by chance.

When you are falling in love it is always already too late: d?ute, as the poets say.

If prose is a house, poetry is a man on fire running quite fast through it".

Banal sexism aside, I find myself tempted to read Wuthering Heights as one thick stacked act of revenge for all that life withheld from Emily. But the poetry shows traces of a deeper explanation. As if anger could be a kind of vocation for some women. It is a chilly thought.

I will not stop singing the Muses who set me dancing.

what is the difference between poetry and prose you know the old analogies prose is a house poetry a man in flames running quite fast through it

It was Sappho who likened a girl to an apple … and compared a bridegroom to Achilles. (Orationes 9.16)

Campaign Against Akhmatova Begins (1922) She ran from lamppost to lamppost, the wind slammed. Trotsky reviewed her in Pravda: One reads with dismay... and an unofficial Communist Party resolution banned her poetry (1925). She didn't notice, didn't know what a Communist Party was in those days. Fog choked the city. Russia's great poets were all about 35 years ol Scraggly trees wandered by the canal in dim sun.

Poetry in general doesn't do anything, there are just individual poems. Some of them I don't get, some of them seem banal, some of them change my life. So there you go. It's bound to be a spectrum, it's the same with bagels.

Or reading poetry. Now there was a job that should exist. To spend one's days in the company of Blake and Dickinson, Yeats and Hopkins, Auden and Milton. To fill one's mind with their wisdom, the music of their words. Today

double white Narcissus,

Roses are red, violets are blue, I'm sick of this poem, you probably are too.

Those moments before a poem comes, when the heightened awareness comes over you, and you realize a poem is buried there somewhere, you prepare yourself. I run around, you know, kind of skipping around the house. It's as though I could fly, almost, and I get very tense before I've told the truth — hard. Then I sit down at the desk and get going with it.

That's what I do: I make coffee and occasionally succumb to suicidal nihilism. But you shouldn't worry — poetry is still first. Cigarettes and alcohol follow

Poetry is my life, my postmark, my hands, my kitchen, my face.

Those moments before a poem comes, when the heightened awareness comes over you, and you realize a poem is buried there somewhere, you prepare yourself. I run around, you know, kind of skipping around the house, marvelous elation. It's as though I could fly.

Poetry led me by the hand out of madness.

The real me lives in words, not in what words mean.

The windows, the starving windows that drive the trees like nails into my heart.