Quotes About Poetry

It hardly seems worthwhile to point out the shortsightedness of those practitioners who would have us believe that the form of the poem is merely its shape.

A great many people seem to think writing poetry is worthwhile, even though it pays next to nothing and is not as widely read as it should be.

Nothing is too small. Nothing is too, quote-unquote, ordinary or insignificant. Those are the things that make up the measure of our days, and they're the things that sustain us. And they're the things that certainly can become worthy of poetry.

Poetry is a sword of lightning, ever unsheathed, which consumes the scabbard that would contain it.

O! for a muse of fire, that would ascend the brightest heaven of invention.

Civic poetry offers us a way to think and talk about issues that so much of public speech ignores, to make them new by dissecting and repurposing public speech, prying its falsehoods from its half-truths. It is fighting for its right to critique our would-be democracy.

I redo the body of my poem like someone who tries to cure her own wound.

When I was young, I overheard a Brit say Canada wasn't a real country because it doesn't have any poets. Even then, I kind of knew that was wrong, but I still thought, 'Wow, here's my chance to do something, to be of service to my country.'

Definitely, some of the artistry and poetry has been lost in modern chess. It's very rare that I play a game where I'm like, 'Wow, this is really interesting. There were so many possibilities! It was such a rich game.'

It's always a combination of physics and poetry that I find inspiring. It's hard to wrap your head around things like the Hubble scope.

'Dead Poets Society' was a very influential film on me and so talking about that movie with him, he just inspired me to continue writing poetry and we talked a lot about our favourite poets. My wrap present from Robin was a beautiful limited edition copy of Walt Whitman's 'Leaves of Grass' and that's a great memory for me.

Lapped in poetry, wrapped in the picturesque, armed with logical sentences and inalienable words.

In terms of smaller changes over time, I think good plays are like poems. Every syllable counts. So I wrestle with word choice, rhythm in final drafts.

I decided that it was not wisdom that enabled poets to write their poetry, but a kind of instinct or inspiration, such as you find in seers and prophets who deliver all their sublime messages without knowing in the least what they mean.

The most important thing for poets to do is to write as little as possible.

My favorite subject probably was math. I love math. Figures just intrigue me. I was really good at math. English probably was my worst subject. But I used to write a lot of poetry. I used to write poetry all the time.

Sometimes I feel as if I am read before I write. When I write a poem about my mother, Palestinians think my mother is a symbol for Palestine. But I write as a poet, and my mother is my mother. She's not a symbol.

Poets write the words you have heard before but in a new sequence.

It's hard to write haiku. I write long, silly Indian poems.

Like a pianist runs her fingers over the keys, I'll search my mind for what to say. Now, the poem may want you to write it. And then sometimes you see a situation and think, 'I'd like to write about that.' Those are two different ways of being approached by a poem, or approaching a poem.

I make it clear why I write as I do and why other poets write as they do. After hundreds of experiments I decided to go my own way in style and see what would happen.

I write some country music. There's a song called 'I Hope You Dance.' Incredible. I was going to write that poem; somebody beat me to it.

My father, Eric Trethewey, is a poet, so I had one right inside the house. And on long trips, he'd tell me, if I got bored in the car, to write a poem about it. And I did find that poetry was a way for me, I think as it for a lot of people, to articulate those things that seem hardest to say.

I write poetry on my iPhone. I've got about 100 poems on there.