Quotes About Poetry

?airler f?rsatlar üzerine kurulu hayatla kumar oynamal? - ama art?k sistem pezevenkli?inden ba?ka bir ?ey yapm?yorlar -

When you write, it's just a much more crystalline, compressed version of the voice you think with - though not the one you speak with. I think your writing voice is your laser-guided missile. It's the poetry part of you.

Sometimes it's like that. I go, 'You know what? I'm going to just change scales. I'm going to even change instruments. And I'm going to go into the chromatics of the Spanish language,' and I do. You know, the poem is totally different. It's like a lunar voice versus a day voice, a solar voice.

And your very flesh shall be a great poem.

At the beginning I wasn't really rapping. I had poetry, so it was a spoken word vibe. Then I found beats that you could sing over - lo-fi, ambient stuff. So I was singing over them and trying to put things into practice.

Dabbling with Tagore was always scary. It happens with masters, with contemporary poets you know their vibes and their meaning. Tagore was different; his aura and the feel of his language was different.

I came into music because I thought the presentation of poetry wasn't vibrant enough. So I merged improvised poetry with basic rock chords. That was my original mission.

I was a victim of a stereotype. There were only two of us Negro kids in the whole class, and our English teacher was always stressing the importance of rhythm in poetry. Well, everybody knows - except us - that all Negroes have rhythms, so they elected me class poet.

18th century opera is packed with emotion, but contains not a trace of kitsch. Only with the 'thees' and 'thous' of Victorian poetry does the disease begin to grow in our poetic tradition.

It could be that all awful dictators are frustrated artists - Mao with his poetry and Mussolini with his monuments. Stalin was once a journalistic hack, and I can personally testify to how frustrated they are. Pol Pot left a very edgy photo collection behind. And Osama seems quite interested in video.

It took me 14 years to write poems about Vietnam. I had never thought about writing about it, and in a way I had been systematically writing around it.

I think I would have been a writer, anyhow, in the sense of having written a story every now and then, or continued writing poetry. But it was the war experience and the two novels I wrote about Vietnam that really got me started as a professional writer.

The Vietnam War and the Iraq war, in different ways, both made me feel like I could not not address them. I'm very doubtful about the usefulness of poetry to do that.

A stock certificate is not a tool, like a shovel, or a commodity, like a pound of cheese. What we sell a customer is not a share in a business, but a view of the Elysian Fields. A financier is a creative artist. Our function is to stimulate the imagination. We are poets!

Is he handsome?" "A stunner. Tall and big-chested, with blue eyes and hair the color of summer wheat. And his accent . . ." "Irresistible?" "Oh, yes. There's something about a Scottish burr that makes it seem as if a man is either about to recite poetry or toss you over his shoulder and carry you away." "Maybe both at the same time," Phoebe said dreamily, sipping her tea.

In no time at all, Beatrix appeared. She was wearing a white dress made of thin, flowing layers, the bodice wrapped intricately over the curves of her breasts. The translucence of her chest and upper arms gave her the look of emerging from the white silk.

As if anyone could do such painstaking work when a man is screaming in agony." "I told you I wouldn't scream," Leo retorted from the bedroom. "I only do that when Marks starts reciting her poetry." Despite her consternation, Catherine almost smiled.

Emily Dickinson calls it 'truth told slant,

Poetry is history to be protected, lessons to be learned, a path to change our society or prevent its demise.

Generosity of the dead. This states The big problem of poetry. Who could Speak for the buildings, for the future of the dead The dead who are implicated in all I can say? On this very beautiful surface Where I want to live

Since I couldn't then write the poems I wanted to write, I would be the poet of the anonymous fuck. This was not so much a substitution as a technique of self-invention, an experimental method for the grandness of becoming. Other poets, I would later learn, had mentors, whatever mentors were. I had fucking.

Like poetry, in times of intense emotion the image returns to me. Like poetry, it stroked my soul and, by turns, lulled and stoked my senses.

A poem is like a score for the human voice.

in the last few years American poetry has come out of a poetry of complaint, not praising, and it was initially maybe rich. And it can continue to be rich if we remember that we shouldn't write out of complaint. We should write out of grief, but not grievance. Grief is rich, ecstatic. But grievance is not -- it's a complaint, it's whining.