Quotes About Awareness

Poetry exists partly to undermine the certainties of an accepted intellectual system, by opening a fissure of awareness at which the reality of the unconquered world may enter.

for what is the gift of the poet and the artist except to see the sights which others cannot see and to hear the sounds that others cannot hear?

Poetry is the way we help give name to the nameless so it can be thought.

The poet speaks to all men of that other life of theirs that they have smothered and forgotten.

But it isn't easy,' said Pooh. 'Because Poetry and Hums aren't things which you get, they're things which get you. And all you can do is to go where they can find you.

Poetry is what makes the invisible appear.

The poet doesn't invent. He listens.

The fear of poetry is an indication that we are cut off from our own reality.

Poetry is the art of overhearing ourselves say things from which it is impossible to retreat.

Life is a poem most people never read.

I come here to speak poetry. It will always be in the grass. It will also be necessary to bend down to hear it. It will always be too simple to be discussed in assemblies.

For me, poetry has no point in existing if it's not to be a prompt or aid to political and ethical change.

The bad poet is usually unconscious where he ought to be conscious, and conscious where he ought to be unconscious.

I think there's no excuse for the American poetry reader not knowing a good deal about what is going on in the rest of the world.

True poetry is a function of awakening. It awakens us, but it must retain the memory of previous dreams.

For a poet, making poems is a way of viewing the world, being in the world, breathing.

For now, poetry has the capacity - in its own ways and by its own means - to remind us of something we are forbidden to see.

We sleep in language if language does not come to wake us up with its strangeness.

I live not in dreams but in contemplation of a reality that is perhaps the future.

Why speak of the use of poetry? Poetry is what uses us.

Outrage and possibility are in all the poems we know.

Now the ears of my ears awake and now the eyes of my eyes are opened.

Poetry is an affair of sanity, of seeing things as they are.

Writing poetry is a process of discovery...you can smell the poem before you see it....Like some animal.