Quotes About Poetry

It is certainly quite wrong to read a poem in a hurry, as if it were a telegram.

No te hagas la que está durmiendo, recuerda de tu trovador; que yo ya comprendo... comprendo la humana ecuación de tu amor.

We come from a country that has made a fetish if not a virtue out of proving it can live without art: high, low, old, new, fat, lean, and particularly the rarely visible nocturnal art of poetry. We must do something with our time on this small aleatory sphere for motives other than money. Power is not an acceptable surrogate.

Poetry is the language of intensity. Because we are going to die, an expression of intensity is justified.

I am suggesting that the radical of poetry lies not in the resolution of doubts but in their proliferation

Almost none of the poetries I admire stick to their labels, native or adopted ones. Rather, they are vagrant in their identifications. Tramp poets, there you go, a new label for those with unstable allegiances.

Poetry seems especially like nothing else so much as itself. Poetry is not like, it is the very lining of the inner life.

Poetry is tribal not material. As such it lights the fire and keeps watch over the flame. Believe me, this is where you get warm again. And naked. This is where you can remember the good times along with the worst; where you are not allowed to forget the worst, else you cannot be healed.

Poetry and advertising (the basest mode of which is propaganda) are in direct and total opposition. If you do not use language you are used by it.

Poetry helps us to suffer more efficiently

Lead me, guide me to the light of your paper. Keep me in your arc of acuity. And when the ream is spent. Write a poem on my back. I'll never wash it off.

Poets are mostly voters and taxpayers, but the alienation of the poet is a common theme. Among poets there are also probably higher than average rates of clutch burnout, job turnover, rooting about, sleep apnea, noncompliance, nervous leg syndrome, depression, litigation, black clothing, and so forth, but this is where we live, or as Leonard Cohen put it, poetry is the opiate of the poets.

As in all callings, poetry secures a kind of ecstasis. There may be a wiser vantage, but we haven't discovered one yet. Perception leads to further perception. Perceive. Perceive. "See what the grass would see if it had eyes," writes Oppen.

Would I be commenting on Amy Fisher? Was that the sort of subject that someone who hoped to become poet laureate should discuss? Would those British laureates who had traditionally written about royal birthdays and royal jubilees have dealt with such goings on?

My advice to the reader approaching a poem is to make the mind still and blank. Let the poem speak. This charged quiet mimics the blank space ringing the printed poem, the nothing out of which something takes shape.

Mr. B. D. Harper's death was a milestone. It may have seemed an atrocity to you; to us, it was poetry. Contrary to what you'd like to believe, this was not the act of a sick person, but the raging of a powerful new underclass. Mr. Harper's death was not a painful one, but it was unusual, and we trust that it got your attention. Soon we start playing for keeps. Wait for number three! El Fuego, Comandante, Las Noches de Diciembre

Poems that sustain our contemplation, disrupt our complacencies, and leave us changed" -Carl Phillips

They should have sent a poet.

an encounter in space] Some celestial event. No--no words--no words to describe it. Poetry! They should have sent a poet. So beautiful. So beautiful...I had no idea. I had no idea.

Poetry is the journal of the sea animal living on land, wanting to fly in the air. Poetry is a search for syllables to shoot at the barriers of the unknown and the unknowable. Poetry is a phantom script telling how rainbows are made and why they go away.

Fog The fog comes on little cat feet. It sits looking over harbor and city on silent haunches and then moves on.

I've written some poetry I don't understand myself

I'm a poet. And then I put the poetry in the drama. I put it in short stories, and I put it in the plays. Poetry's poetry. It doesn't have to be called a poem, you know.

It was useless trying to explain to Cecila that poetry wasn't a commodity, that it could never be bought or sold, that it was, in fact, unteansferrable, remaining forever a part of the one who wrote it.