Quotes About Art

I have tried to remember throughout that poetry is made by flesh-and-blood human beings. It is a bloody art. It lives on a human scale and thrives when it is passed from hand to hand.

When anger and sorrow overflow, sometimes it becomes poetry.

A bad poem is one that vanishes into meaning.

The beauty of reality-based art - art underwritten by reality hunger - is that it's perfectly situated between life itself and (unattainable) "life as art".

My novels and poems are meant to be read aloud. That's why jazz musicians have been able to adapt my stuff.

Most of us have been subjected to terrible political poetry at least once or twice in our lifetimes, and so we tend to shy away from it.

Democritus maintains that there can be no great poet without a spite of madness.

Now, the process of writing poetry is very messy. Not systematic, never quite the same

Poetry is always close kin to the impossible, isn't it?

Indignation leads to the making of poetry. [Lat., Facit indignatio versum.]

Can poetry be a form of social change? I don't know the answer to that. I do think art can have a social impact even if it may be difficult to see the effects of that impact, to assess or measure it.

Poetry is an art practiced with the terribly plastic material of human language.

I write poetry. It comes naturally to me, but from a technical point of view it forces me to pay close attention to language and to scan.

Poetry is a tracing of the trajectories of a finite sound to the infinite points of its echoes.

For me, the measure of a poem is the word, not the line.

It's a good thing to get poetry off the shelves and more into public life.

When I first started to write poetry, I used to feel as if my tongue would go numb.

Our best history is still poetry.

I always did poetry, and [rap music is] pretty much hip-hop melody with poems.

I write poetry anyway and have for years and years. For me, putting fiction and poetry together is like the best of both worlds.

when a poem says something that could not have been said in any other way, in music, prose, sculpture, movement or paint, then it is poetry.

No verse which is unmusical or obscure can be regarded as poetry whatever other qualities it may possess.

I was attracted to poetry, which is perhaps the purest of the art forms, where love is the medium of exchange and the nobility of love is considered. It's a land of higher ideals.

Reading a piece of poetry with no beat in front of 20 people is way more challenging than rocking for 10,000 people.