Quotes About Poetry

There's no short or easy way to describe my poet laureate experience except to say I was quite surprised at the high demand for the poet laureate. I probably average an event per week at many expected and odd venues across the state, e.g., as grand marshal of a small town fall parade. Yes, poetry is alive but not always in ways that can be predicted.

Not to be too dogmatic, I don't believe there is anything such thing as free verse, as long as the poet is using language, the poet can't break enough rules to escape and still be understood.

I change over time and my perception of the poem also changes, hence endless revision. I sometimes worry that I spend more time revising than writing new poems.

Which of us, in his ambitious moments, has not dreamed of the miracle of a poetic prose--musical, but without (conventional) rhythm and rhyme, and supple enough to adapt itself to the lyrical impulses of the soul.

There are so many poetic styles and ways to write a poem. I can hardly say that I've consciously chosen a particular style, but more that I've just found myself writing and then started accumulating reasons why I was writing the way I was.

No establishment figure wants to tolerate affrontive poetry that exposes the failure of the totalizing system and claims it contradicts God's will.

The poets speak only poetry, not program, not policy, not even advocacy, only poetry. But the poetry exists in order to make available what the ideologues are unable to see and what the policy makers are unable to grasp.

It is only a poem, and we might say rightly that singing a song does not change reality. However, we must not say that with too much conviction. The evocation of an alternative reality consists at least in part in the battle for language and the legitimization of a new rhetoric. The language of the empire is surely the language of managed reality, of production and schedule and market. But that language will never permit or cause freedom because there is no newness in it. Doxology

Aristide collected memories, stringing lines of poetry like pearls on a cord.  When he called the lines to his mind, a host of memories accompanied them.  Memories which he otherwise might have lost.

Why did Baudelaire — why does anyone — write poetry, in the teeth of all the evidence that one wants you to do so? No one wants you to write it and having written it in spite of them, no one wants to read it. Above all, no one wants to pay for it. For better or worse, a poem has a hard time turning into a commodity.

Bei einem Dichter klauen ist Diebstahl, bei vielen Dichtern klauen ist Recherche

Etwas Einmaliges, etwas Unvergängliches formte sich in meinem Kopf. Ein kunstvolles Gebilde aus Worten und Sätzen, das sich wie eine außerirdische Kreatur von fremdartiger Schönheit in meinem Denken materialisierte - und zu mir sprach, in makellosen Versen! Es was ein Gedicht. Es hatte nicht das Geringste mit meinem eigenen Denken zu tun, es waren Gedanken aus dem All! Ein Geschenk der Sterne!

Biblionekormanten könnten niemanden ws antun, nicht mal sich selbst, obwohl sie ständig mit dem Tod, mit Mord und Selbstauslöschung kokettieren. Sie sind lediglich am Ritual der literarischen Trauer interessiert. Das ist vielleicht die poetische Form der Todessehnsucht.

Poetry teaches us music, metaphor, condensation and specificity.

A very intimate sense of the expressiveness of outward things, which ponders, listens, penetrates, where the earlier, less developed consciousness passed lightly by, is an important element in the general temper of our modern poetry.

That sense of a life in natural objects, which in most poetry is but a rhetorical artifice, was, then, in Wordsworth the assertion of what was for him almost literal fact.

Such discussions help us very little to enjoy what has been well done in art or poetry, to discriminate between what is more and what is less excellent in them, or to use words like beauty, excellence, art, poetry, with a more precise meaning than they would otherwise have.

Many attempts have been made by writers on art and poetry to define beauty in the abstract, to express it in the most general terms, to find some universal formula for it.

Prose on certain occasions can bear a great deal of poetry; on the other hand, poetry sinks and swoons under a moderate weight of prose.

In listening mood she seemed to stand,The guardian Naiad of the strand.

I burned incense, swept the earth, and waited for a poem to come... Then I laughed, and climbed the mountain, leaning on my staff. How I'd love to be a master of the blue sky's art: see how many sprigs of snow-white clouds he's brushed in so far today

Titian, Tintoretto, and Paul Veronese absolutely enchanted me, for they took away all sense of subject.... It was the poetry of color which I felt, procreative in its nature, giving birth to a thousand things which the eye cannot see, and distinct from their cause.

Poetry had breathed over and sanctified the land.

Perhaps there never was a monument more characteristic of an age and people than the Alhambra; a rugged fortress without, a voluptuous palace within; war frowning from its battlements; poetry breathing throughout the fairy architecture of its halls.