Quotes About Poetry

MORDICO: Yes, to speak of an "un-American poetry" is to be anti-modern, searching for an essence, not in words but among words—to help English grow a limb it does not have.

If we sound fluency, and we write poetry which appears to articulate that condition—Carlos thinks hard about this—a reader will not acknowledge wires as nets in a poem as anything but metaphor for the mill.

Benjamin Zephaniah

Roses are reddish Violets are bluish If it weren't for Christmas We'd all be Jewish.

I like to write, I like to reflect, and not just poetry, I like to write my thoughts down. I think it's good for people who are more introspective, and it helps me get a better understanding of myself.

A social consciousness should be reflected in your poetry.

Any reflection about poetry should begin, or end, with this question: who and how many read poetry books?

I've been fascinated over the years by the way refrains work. Think, say, of the refrains in Yeats' ballads. Ideally, each time the refrain comes back in a poem, it is both the same and different. It works by counterpoint and reiteration. It accrues meaning.

The experimental poetry thing is not my thing. It's a programme of the avant-garde: basically a refusal of the kind of poetry I write.

I'd always tended to regard song lyrics as sort of a bastard medium because they're subjugated under the music. If you were to regard them as poetry, it would be bad, embarrassing, confessional poetry - a lot of the lyrics I love.

I have often said that I think children's books are like poetry. Finding the exact right words to tell a story is something all writers, regardless of genre, are challenged to do, but it is in children's that the art of selection really becomes an art.

Anyone who regards poetry as an entertainment, as a 'read,' commits an anthropological crime, in the first place against himself.

That's all there was in our house: poetry and choir rehearsal and duets and so forth; I listened to Dad and Mother discuss things about poetry and delivery and voice and diction - I don't think anyone could know how much it really means.

Piece by piece I sent my first book of poems to American Poetry Review and was rejected one by one.

I think when kids just see well-crafted poetry, it's just obtuse to them. It's hard to relate to.

I would not say I chose to write long poems on a conscious level. The long poem has been a relative constant.

Writing limericks gives us a playground, a release from these conventions.

Back then, I was an acoustically-oriented artist. Honestly, 'Poetry Man' wouldn't have been my first choice.

At school, I was never given a sense that poetry was something flowery or light. It's a complex and controlled way of using language. Rhythms and the music of it are very important. But the difficulty is that poetry makes some kind of claim of honesty.

I grew up in a household that had its roots in church and community and culture and poetry and song and in the arts. Those aspects certainly shaped what I do.

I am a huge Leonard Cohen person.

I have always been a huge fan of Shakespeare.

After watching Guru Dutt's films, I became a huge fan of Sahir Ludhianvi's poetry and the songs of Guru Dutt's films.

Writing criticism is to writing fiction and poetry as hugging the shore is to sailing in the open sea.