Quotes About Art

Poetry makes nothing happen.

No poem ever bought a hamburger, or not too many.

I suppose I'm saying that defiance is actually part of the lyric job

Poetry is the scholar's art.

...few young poets [are] testing their poems against the ear. They're writing for the page, and the page, let me tell you, is a cold bed.

Poetry a riprap on the slick rock of metaphysics

I began writing poetry when I was about 10. Bad poetry, but you start with bad poetry.

Poetry dovetails contradictions.

The demand that poetry be immediately understandable to everyone is truly absurd.

To have ruined one's self over poetry is an honour

Maybe that is the power of poetry. It somehow transcends news cycles, and becomes a part of our collective imagination. That is the beauty of the art form I like to play with.

Poetry has never brought me in enough money to buy shoestrings.

Who would not spout the family teapot in order to talk with Keats for an hour about poetry, or with Jane Austen about the art of fiction?

Writing poetry is like always being in love. What masochism! What luxury!

Fiction will always be my greatest love, with poetry close behind.

I am charmed by concrete poetry (but it's very hard to do well, I think) and in general by the idea of mixing the visual and the textual.

Anybody who has listened to certain kinds of music, or read certain kinds of poetry, or heard certain kinds of performances on the concertina, will admit that even suicide has its brighter aspects.

I think poetry involves heightened noticing or imagining as well as creating a certain made shape. On the other hand, that shape can be made just by pointing at something and saying, "That's a poem".

Poetry cannot be translation

He says his aim is poetry. One does not aim at poetry with pistols. At poets, perhaps.

Every great poem is in itself limited by necessity, but in its suggestions unlimited and infinite.

Poetry is written with tears, fiction with blood, and history with invisible ink.

I don't see much difference between prose poems and flash fiction (I've often taught the latter as the former), but then I also don't see that much difference between art and poetry.

I never really read Allen Ginsberg poetry, even though I have a book he gave me.