Quotes About Poetry

your job is to be honest and to try not to be too boring. However, if you must choose between being eclectic and various or being repetitious and boring, be repetitious and boring. Most good poets are, if read very long at one sitting.

Poetry as an art form invites us to go beyond our preconceptions, to invent, to be truly imaginative. One reason for this is because that action, of going beyond ourselves, is an effect of the form itself: the poem is a structure which helps us to think differently, and one of the ways it does this is through its focus on imagery, encouraging us to think through our images in rational or irrational patterns.

Leaving Inishmore' by Michael Longley, from Selected Poems (1998, p.22). What

The thing we are trying to say is in the language of leaves.

Sometimes I lay my body down on a marble slab . . . and become poetry.

The jerboa] survives depravity not by adopting habits of better-known species but by adapting creatively to the unique rigors of its environment. Although Moore's animals do have innately poetic qualities, such as the jerboa's rhythmic leaps, the poems emphasize what she would later identify as her most valuable assets as an artist: persistence and fortitude. Her animal poems are both instructions in the art of survival and acts of survival themselves.

Why Are Your Poems so Dark?" Isn't the moon dark too, most of the time? And doesn't the white page seem unfinished without the dark stain of alphabets? When God demanded light, he didn't banish darkness. Instead he invented ebony and crows and that small mole on your left cheekbone. Or did you mean to ask "Why are you sad so often?" Ask the moon. Ask what it has witnessed. Linda Pastan, Poetry (August 2003

The Mexicans have a fervent appreciation of poetry and make regular use of it. It occupies a high and ancient seat in the Mexican culture. The Aztecs called it "a scattering of jades," jade being what they valued most, far more than the gold for which they were murdered in great numbers by invading Spaniards. They felt that the more profound aspects of certain concepts, whether emotional, philosophical, political, or artistic, could be expressed only in poetry.

When a peculiar fact or well-stated bit of information triggers a poem, most of what I'll need is there where I stumbled on it. If questions arise later (moons of Jupiter, a three-syllable squid), Google is awfully handy of course.

Ecological concerns are daily news now (alas). And poets have been writing all along about stars and roses; it's not such a stretch now to bring in the Hubble telescope or dark matter or genetics.

A group of us started a community center in Santa Monica. We've tried different programs, and three have worked really well. A poetry group. Once a week we visit Venice High and talk to girls at risk.

There is a strong connection between our ability to use our hands in useful work, and our ability to find happiness in daily life... daily repetitive tasks (are) the compulsive calmness that infuses our pedestrian chores with poetry. - Annie Modessitt

Shaw...has a woman ever asked you to write a poem for her?" "Good God, no," Gideon replied with a snicker. "Shaws don't write poetry. They pay others to write it for them and then take the credit for it.

I've done a number of readings at poetry lounges in Vancouver and Los Angeles. I've compiled a book of poetry that's completed, and two others I'm working on.

Jazz and poetry both involve a structure that may be familiar and to some extent predictable. And then, you try to create as much surprise and spontaneity and feeling and variation while respecting that structure.

Poetry can unleash a terrible fear. I suppose it is the fear of possibilities, too many possibilities, each with its own endless set of variations... With basketball, you can correct your own mistakes, immediately and beautifully, in midair.

I'm about 75 pages into a book on poetry. I don't know if anybody wants to read it. It's on any broad variety of subjects. I walk down the street and think of a topic and jot it down and say, 'Okay, that's another one.' They go from the humorous to the serious to every topic imaginable.

I don't shape trends, I'd say. I merely reflect them. I think the emphasis is on 'them.' I like variety in poetry. I love how it comes in so many guises. As rock lyric, as rap, as note on a fridge.

I used to write sonnets and various things, and moved from there into writing prose, which, incidentally, is a lot more interesting than poetry, including the rhythms of prose.

Living here on Earth, we breathe the rhythms of a universe that extends infinitely above us. When resonant harmonies arise between this vast outer cosmos and the inner human cosmos, poetry is born.

I would come to understand there is no poem separable from its source. I began to see that poems are not just an individual florescence. They are also a vast root system growing down into ideas and understandings. Almost unbidden, they tap into the history and evolution of art and language.

There's not a good poet I know who has not at the beck and call of his memory a vast quantity of poetry that composes his mental library.

The music just tends to be a vehicle for that poetry.

'Blue Velvet' changed my life forever. It was like I'd always read Chaucer and suddenly discovered Charles Bukowski. It made me understand that there is poetry of sublime ecstasy and dark terror, and it spoke to a side of me that hadn't been reached before.