Quotes About Poetry

You may be guided by the unending effort of poets and artists, biologists and psychiatrists to describe that irreplaceable and still mysterious emotion so essential to the human condition, but all the search engines in the universe cannot compete with the first kiss.

A public expectation, it has to be said, not of poetry as such but of political positions variously approvable by mutually disapproving groups.

I'd been writing poems for many years, but most of them I didn't like. Then, when I was 23, I wrote one I did like, sent it to 'The Paris Review' - the highest publication I could think of - and they accepted it. No other moment in my literary life has quite come close to that.

I've been reading poetry publicly for 20 years, and this is what you do - you express, you sometimes dig a bit to get a conversation started. That's the point of poetry. You're supposed to go, 'Hmmmm,' and 'Woooh!'

Well I guess the plan was to write poetry and publish books and make a living from writing poetry. That was a pretty ambitious plan I guess.

I never became a writer for the money. I am a poet first. Even getting published is a miracle for poets.

If I weren't musical, then I would have just published a book, you know? But I'm lucky enough to play piano, and so I use piano to convert my poems.

I have been writing poetry since 1975. My first poetry book was published in 1986.

I had art as a major, along with English, French and History. I had dance, modern dance. In English I was allowed to write my own poetry, which I eventually got published.

My first collection of poems was published by Bloodaxe Books, which was then a very new imprint.

At the beginning, there was no chance I'd get published so I thought I'd give it a go live. I had to perform in rock band places and working men's clubs, where you wouldn't expect to find poetry. I ploughed a lonely furrow.

Well - I started writing - probably in the early 60s and by say '65-'66 I had read most of the poetry that had been published - certainly in the 20 years prior to that.

I published, privately, a collection of my serious poetry I had written over the years. I only published 50 copies, which I gave to friends, in a special deluxe edition. It was ridiculously expensive but I'm glad that I did it.

I got the writing bug in the fourth grade when a poem of mine was published in the school newspaper. Music criticism came a little later, when I was in high school.

Working alone on a poem, a poet is of all artists the most free. The poem can be written with a modicum of technology, and can be published, in most cases, quite cheaply.

John Updike's first published book was a collection of poems.

My first book of poems was published privately in 1949. That was my mother. The book was '25 Poems.' It cost 200 dollars.

Elizabeth Barrett Browning could write a poem two pages long. Could she have brought it to a music publisher?

I have a publishing company of books by me and books of others. It drew people to poetry readings and photo exhibitions and painting exhibitions that I've been doing for years before that.

Everybody interprets things differently with their own perception, and I want poetry to pull out of them their own feelings.

The mystic purchases a moment of exhilaration with a lifetime of confusion; and the confusion is infectious and destructive. It is confusing and destructive to try and explain anything in terms of anything else, poetry in terms of psychology.

In numbers warmly pure and sweetly strong.

The poetry I grew up on is really an intense form of poetry; it's so pure and powerful.

In every culture, in every language, there is expressive play, expressive word play; there's language use to different purposes that we would call poetry.