Quotes About Poetry

The iambic line, with its characteristic forward movement from short to long, or light to heavy, or unstressed to stressed, is the quintessential measure of English verse.

There are people who think it's easier to write books in verse, and it's definitely not.

All through childhood, I wrote verses and mysteries. There is, for me, one connection: structure. My poetry is metrical, rhyming.

Believe it or not, one of the first poets I was aware of was Yeats. I recited 'The Lake Isle of Innisfree' at a verse speaking competition when I was eight or nine.

Country music especially can get very formulaic - you know, you have to have your verses and a bridge and a chorus, and a lot of the songs are written as just plain and simple poetry on the road.

To read a poem in January is as lovely as to go for a walk in June

During a warm winter rain ... the basins of her collarbones collected water.

There's two kinds of women--those you write poems about and those you don't.

The question of what kind of a thing a text or poem is now becomes a function neither of what the poet might have intended by its words nor of what the conventions of grammar and meaning might seem to require of them, but rather of the reader's irreducibly subjective experience in her encounter with those words.

But the reason I decided to go to New York was because I had seen Iggy Pop and I thought I had seen God. And because I had sent to Interview magazine for Rene Ricard's first book of poetry, The Blue Book. I had never sent for anything before but something told me to do this. I had read that book over and over again like a Bible. I realized that a book can reach out and embrace you like an arm and make you walk away from everything you thought you understood.

Invite him to poetry club, Doff said with a smirk. See if he asks you to take a look at his Emily Dickinson. Beatrice snorted. How long did it take you to think that up? Most of lunch, and the rest of G block, Doff said, shrugging modestly. I started with 'read his Charles Dickens,' but Charles Dickens is a novelist. What about his Philip K. Dick? Who's that? asked Doff. He wrote the book that got turned into Blade Runner .

stillborn love notes provide small satisfaction

And we sit there, by its margin, while the moon, who loves it too, stoops down to kiss it with a sister's kiss, and throws her silver arms around it clingingly; and we watch it as it flows, ever singing, ever whispering

They took him to Wagner festivals and Burne-Jones's private views. They read him all the minor poets. They booked seats for him at all Ibsen's plays. They introduced him into all the most soulful circles of artistic society. His days were one long feast of other people's enjoyments.

You can never rouse Harris. There is no poetry about Harries - no wild yearning for the unattainable. Harris never weeps, he knows not why If Harris's eyes fill with tears, you can bet it is because Harris has been eating raw onions, or has put too much Worcester over his chop.

Listen," Richard says, "unless you're about to inherit some money, what we're talking about here is irreversible, fatal. You have fiscal Ebola, Matt. You are bleeding out through your nose and your mouth and your eye sockets, from your financial asshole." See! Fiscal Ebola? My financial asshole is bleeding? This was exactly why I started poetfolio.com; there are money poets everywhere.

Matt smirked. "Well, it is interesting because lots of poems have mathematical imagery or structure. Concrete triangular poems and syllabic verse, for example. Did you know that we subconsciously track the sound properties in poetry?

Heroic poetry has ever been esteemed the greatest work of human nature.

That impulse I think is a form of love. Poetry is something that comes to you, rather than your having to work out its form beforehand.

It is bizarre that some people can't understand how a serious poet could work at a finance firm. Goethe was a bureaucrat. Eliot worked as a banker.

I didn't write poems for a number of years after graduate school because the criticisms of other students in the workshops wouldn't quiet down in my mind when I tried to work.

One thing I discovered is that the book world is vast. It's easy to walk around the store - even the room with literature and poetry, where I work most often - and feel overwhelmed.

In my own work, I usually revise through forty or fifty drafts of a poem before I begin to feel content with it.

Through my former experiences, writing poetry and learning other languages leading up to English I find ways to stitch words together that may seem a bit odd, but somehow, sometimes they do work.