Quotes About Poetry

Poetry speaks to you either at first sight or not at all. A flash of revelation and a flash of response.

My art and poetry is very political now. Because you've got to find that truth within you and express yourself. Somewhere out there, I know, there will be people who will listen.

The globally acclaimed author of Fully Human, Fully Alive: A New Life through a New Vision, John Powell, estimates that an average person taps only 10 percent of his potential, sees only 10 percent of the beauty that is all around him, hears only 10 percent of its music and poetry, smells only 10 percent of its fragrance, and tastes only 10 percent of the deliciousness of being alive.

Walt Whitman said, "To have great poets, there must be great audiences.

Poetry is a kind of lying, necessarily. To profit the poet or beauty. But also in that truth may be told only so. Those who, admirably, refuse to falsify (as those who will not risk pretensions) are excluded from saying even so much. Degas said he didn't paint what he saw, but what would enable them to see the thing he had.

Michiko Nogami (1946—1982)" Is she more apparent because she is not anymore forever? Is her whiteness more white because she was the color of pale honey? A smokestack making the sky more visible. A dead woman filling the whole world. Michiko said, "The roses you gave me kept me awake with the sound of their petals falling.

Doing Poetry Poem, you sonofabitch, it's bad enough that I embarrass myself working so hard to get it right even a little, and that little grudging and awkward. But it's afterwards I resent, when the sweet sure should hold me like a trout in the bright summer stream. There should be at least briefly access to your glamour and tenderness. But there's always this same old dissatisfaction instead.

Alone on Christmas Eve in Japan" Not wanting to lose it all for poetry. Wanting to live the living. All this year looking on the graveyard below my apartment. Holding myself tenderly in this marred body. Wondering if the quiet I feel is that happiness wise people speak of, or the modulation that is the acquiescence to death beginning.

The Forgotten Dialect of the Heart" How astonishing it is that language can almost mean, and frightening that it does not quite.

searches out what is beyond pleasure, is outside process. Not the passion so much as what the fervor can be an ingress to. Poetry fishes us to find a world part by part, as the photograph interrupts the flux to give us time to see each thing separate and enough. The poem chooses part of our endless flowing forward to know its merit with attention.

Don't use the phone. People are never ready to answer it. Use poetry.

We're a beat generation.

Don't use the phone. People are never ready to answer it. Use poetry.

Early on, if I was alone two or three nights in a row, I'd start writing poems about suicide.

I look for poetry in English because it's the only language I read.

We all need ways to express ourselves, and poetry is one of mine.

Otherwise I don't read much adult poetry at all, because I'm not smart enough and mostly I don't get it.

Frankly, writing poetry for children is plain old fun, and I consider myself blessed to have such a delightful career.

Poetry seems to sink into us the way prose doesn't. I can still quote verses I learned when I was very young, but I have trouble remembering one line of a novel I just finished reading.

As long as there are young people, and old people, too, who can imagine realities beyond seeing and touching, and as long as there are poets, and artists, and musicians, there will be unicorns.

AimlesslyIt pounds the shore. White and aimless signals. NoOne listens to poetry.

See how weak prose is.... Presently I shall go to a bar and there one or two poets will speak to me and I to them and we will try to destroy each other or attract each other and nothing will happen because we will be speaking in prose.

Words are what sticks to the real. We use them to push the real, to drag the real into the poem. They are what we hold on with, nothing else. They are as valuable in themselves as rope with nothing to be tied to.

Aimlessly It pounds the shore. White and aimless signals. No One listens to poetry. — from "Thing Language