Quotes About Poetry

When I used to listen to the poets in other languages and the kind of appreciation they received, I wanted to be there on the dais and experience that myself.

I just sit down and write. I never know when. The most recent one is 'Sarah Still,' which is about our life, Sarah and me. It's my favorite of all my poems.

I've been writing a lot of poetry recently. It helps me think and work things out.

Someone told me just recently that poets are eulogists. It's their job, to eulogize. I didn't know that, but it makes sense. Because in almost every poem of mine there is a loss.

If I'm walking along the street, ideas come. Ideas about things that I'm interested in. I've jotted them down in the past on bits of paper and then, more recently, on apps in my phone. I've always written poetry since I was a kid.

The rules or 'laws' of poetry are only tentative devices, an approximate scheme. There is no Sinaitic recipe for poetry, for the individual poem is the norm.

As a child, I learned hundreds of poems by heart, which I can recite to this day.

I work with a lot of young people who have poems that are changing their lives, that they're eager to talk about, but every now and then when I meet someone, maybe someone of my parents' generation, and I tell them that I write poetry, they'll begin to recite something that they memorized when they were in school that has never left them.

I can recite poetry, but I cannot write it.

My childhood was all about going to church, singing in church. And later on, after I got a little older, my mother taught me how to do poems for Easter and Mother's Day, recitals and so on. I got attached to that, so as I got older and older, I began to recite poetry.

Irish poetry has lost the ready ear and the comforts of recognition. But we must go on. We must be true to our own minds.

In the long revolt against inherited forms that has by now become the narrative of 20th-century poetry in English, no poet was more flamboyant or more recognizable in his iconoclasm than Cummings.

What actually makes poetry poetry is of course impossible to define. We recognize it when we hear it, when we see it, but we can't define it.

It makes me happy to meet other poetry fans. Especially when they recommend poets I'm not familiar with.

The Hindi film that I recommend is 'Ijaazat.' It is my most favourite film; it is a poetry in itself, and Gulzar Sahab is somebody I am a huge fan of.

The residue of religion in my work appears as a modified transcendentalism, and the positivist scientific side of my thought appears as concreteness and realism. The effort to reconcile the two is at the core of all my poetry.

You just go where poetry is, whether it's in your heart or your mind or in books or in places where there's live poetry or recordings.

A poem records emotions and moods that lie beyond normal language, that can only be patched together and hinted at metaphorically.

A dark poem is meant to redeem the dark part.

In the past I have declined to comment on my own work: because, it seems to me, a poem is what it is; because a poem is itself a definition, and to try to redefine it is to be apt to falsify it; and because the author is the person least able to consider his work objectively.

However, if a poem can be reduced to a prose sentence, there can't be much to it.

I think Ginsberg has done more harm to the craft that I honor and live by than anybody else by reducing it to a kind of mean that enables the most dubious practitioners to claim they are poets because they think, If the kind of thing Ginsberg does is poetry, I can do that.

Anyone reading contemporary poetry - especially contemporary African-American poetry - will quickly see that race is an enduring subject. What some don't realize is just how diverse the handling of that subject is. It's as diverse as blackness.

I have fun with words.