Quotes About Interpretation

I always say that photography's closest cousin is poetry because of the way it sparks your imagination and leaves gaps for the viewer to fill in.

Painting is so poetic, while sculpture is more logical and scientific and makes you worry about gravity.

The beauty of poetry is that the creation transcends the poet.

Dancing is poetry with arms and legs.

Poetry is the key to the hieroglyphics of nature.

For me, drawing is everything, because it informs everything. It even informs my poetry. It's the way I begin everything.

[Photography is] very related to poetry. It's suggestive and fragmentary and unsatisfying in a lot of ways. It's as much about what you leave out as what you put in.

Poetry is what is gained in translation.

Poetry is what is lost in translation. It is also what is lost in interpretation.

...if you do not even understand what words say, how can you expect to pass judgement on what words conceal?

Poets are shameless with their experiences: they exploit them.

Conscious writing can be the death of poetry.

It is never what a poem says that matters, but what it is.

It's not the word made flesh we want in writing, in poetry and fiction, but the flesh made word

Genuine poetry can communicate before it is understood.

Words are always getting conventionalized to some secondary meaning. It is one of the works of poetry to take the truants in custody and bring them back to their right senses.

On poetry: Everyone wants to know what it means. But nobody is asking, How does it feel?

It is as impossible to translate poetry as it is to translate music.

. . . All artists' work is autobiographical. Any writer's work is a map of their psyche. You can really see what their concerns are, what their obsessions are, and what interests them.

You will find poetry nowhere unless you bring some of it with you.

Mathematics is the art of giving the same name to different things. [As opposed to the quotation: Poetry is the art of giving different names to the same thing].

Poetry is something in-between the dream and its interpretation.

If your vision of the world is of a certain kind you will put poetry in everything, necessarily.

But I am not political in the current events sense, and I have never wanted anyone to read my poetry that way.