'Therefore' is a word the poet must not know.

A book is sent out into the world, and there is no way of fully anticipating the responses it will elicit. Consider the responses called forth by the Bible, Homer, Shakespeare - let alone contemporary poetry or a modern novel.

A definition of poetry can only determine what poetry should be and not what poetry actually was and is otherwise the most concise formula would be: Poetry is that which at some time and some place was thus named.

A grain of poetry suffices to season a century.

A great many people seem to think writing poetry is worthwhile, even though it pays next to nothing and is not as widely read as it should be.

A group of us started a community center in Santa Monica. We've tried different programs, and three have worked really well. A poetry group. Once a week we visit Venice High and talk to girls at risk.

A life is not sufficiently elevated for poetry, unless, of course, the life has been made into an art.

A lot happens by accident in poetry.

A lot of people think, 'I'll give acting or poetry or filmmaking a try. And if it doesn't work out I'll go get a law degree, do something else that's more practical.' For me I went the reverse way. I lived the back-up plan.

A lyric, it is true, is the expression of personal emotion, but then so is all poetry, and to suppose that there are several kinds of poetry, differing from each other in essence, is to be deceived by wholly artificial divisions which have no real being.

A man of eighty has outlived probably three new schools of painting, two of architecture and poetry and a hundred in dress.

A poem begins as a lump in the throat, a sense of wrong, a homesickness, a lovesickness.

A poem can have an impact, but you can't expect an audience to understand all the nuances.

A poem conveys not a message so much as the provenance of a message, an advent of sense.

A poem in form still has to have voice, gesture, a sense of discovery, a metaphoric connection, as any poetry does.

A poem is never finished, only abandoned.

A poem is true if it hangs together. Information points to something else. A poem points to nothing but itself.

A poem might be defined as thinking about feelings - about human feelings and frailties.

A poet can survive everything but a misprint.

A poet is, before anything else, a person who is passionately in love with language.

A poet looks at the world the way a man looks at a woman.

A poet's autobiography is his poetry. Anything else is just a footnote.

A public expectation, it has to be said, not of poetry as such but of political positions variously approvable by mutually disapproving groups.

A theology should be like poetry, which takes us to the end of what words and thoughts can do.

A true poet does not bother to be poetical. Nor does a nursery gardener scent his roses.

A verbal art like poetry is reflective it stops to think. Music is immediate, it goes on to become.

A very intimate sense of the expressiveness of outward things, which ponders, listens, penetrates, where the earlier, less developed consciousness passed lightly by, is an important element in the general temper of our modern poetry.

Alchemy is the art of far and near, and I think poetry is alchemy in that way. It's delightful to distort size, to see something that's tiny as though it were vast.

All bad poetry springs from genuine feeling.

All good poetry is forged slowly and patiently, link by link, with sweat and blood and tears.

All I knew about Ethiopia was from a few records that I like, as well as what I read about the famine. But you get there and it's another world. It's filled with art and music and poetry and intellectuals and writers - all kinds of people.

All poetry has to do is to make a strong communication. All the poet has to do is listen. The poet is not an important fellow. There will also be another poet.

All slang is metaphor, and all metaphor is poetry.

All the modern verse plays, they're terrible they're mostly about the poetry. It's more important that the play is first.

All those authors there, most of whom of course I've never met. That's the poetry side, that's the prose side, that's the fishing and miscellaneous behind me. You get an affection for books that you've enjoyed.

Always be a poet, even in prose.

America was based on a poetic vision. What will happen when it loses its poetry?

American poetry, like American painting, is always personal with an emphasis on the individuality of the poet.

Among the American contemporaries I read with most enjoyment are several North Carolinians. I think the best poetry being written these days is being written by Southerners.

An age which is incapable of poetry is incapable of any kind of literature except the cleverness of a decadence.

An experienced reader uses the poem as an agent of inquiry. This makes poetry very exciting, unstable, and interactive.

And at least in poetry you should feel free to lie. That is, not to lie, but to imagine what you want, to follow the direction of the poem.

And how can poetry stand up against its new conditions? Its position is perfectly precarious.

And I know I'm supposed to feel guilty for wanting people to buy my books... and books in general? Novels and poetry, they belong to the realm of art. How dirty of us to try to hawk art! But, after a decade of hand-wringing and apologies, I can't quite muster the guilt anymore.

And if they haven't got poetry in them, there's nothing you can do that will produce it.

And inasmuch as the bridge is a symbol of all such poetry as I am interested in writing it is my present fancy that a year from now I'll be more contented working in an office than ever before.

And my father was a comic. He could play any musical instrument. He loved to perform. He was a wonderfully comedic character. He had the ability to dance and sing and charm and analyze poetry.

And New York is the most beautiful city in the world? It is not far from it. No urban night is like the night there... Squares after squares of flame, set up and cut into the aether. Here is our poetry, for we have pulled down the stars to our will.

And the second question, can poetry be taught? I didn't think so.

And there are a lot more people reading poetry, but there are not so many people reading an individual poet.

And yet, in a culture like ours, which is given to material comforts, and addicted to forms of entertainment that offer immediate gratification, it is surprising that so much poetry is written.

And, I mean, I think poetry does need to be met to some extent, especially, I guess, 19th century poetry, and for me, it's just been so worth the effort. It's like I'm planting a garden in my head.

Anticipating that most poetry will be worse than carrying heavy luggage through O'Hare Airport, the public, to its loss, reads very little of it.

Any healthy man can go without food for two days - but not without poetry.

Any long work in which poetry is persistent, be it epic or drama or narrative, is really a succession of separate poetic experiences governed into a related whole by an energy distinct from that which evoked them.

Art works because it appeals to certain faculties of the mind. Music depends on details of the auditory system, painting and sculpture on the visual system. Poetry and literature depend on language.

Art: If the object of poetry is, to make men, then poetry is the heir of prophecy.

As an actor, there is room for a certain amount of creativity, but you're always ultimately going to be saying somebody else's words. I don't think I'd have the stamina, skill or ability to write a novel, but I'd love to write short stories and poetry, because those are my two passions.

As civilization advances, poetry almost necessarily declines.

As for how criticism of Keats' poetry relates to criticism of my own work, I'll leave that for others to decide.

As for political poetry, as it's usually defined, it seems there's very little good political poetry.

As I got older, I really got into Tupac's poetry, his books and just learning about his life and what he was into.

As to London we must console ourselves with the thought that if life outside is less poetic than it was in the days of old, inwardly its poetry is much deeper.

At the age when Bengali youth almost inevitably writes poetry, I was listening to European classical music.

At this point we've answered about every question you could possibly imagine about Deep Space Nine, so we do this thing called Theatrical Jazz, where we do a show of bits and pieces of things from plays and literature, poetry... stuff that we like. It's fun.

Auden said poetry makes nothing happen. But I wonder if the opposite could be true. It could make something happen.

Bad, quirky poetry might be better than some of the good stuff, because it really comes from the heart.

Because people are very interested in my poetry, in what I say.

Because, in fact, women, feminists, do read my poetry, and they read it often with the power of their political interpretation. I don't care that's what poetry is supposed to do.

Before people complain of the obscurity of modern poetry, they should first examine their consciences and ask themselves with how many people and on how many occasions they have genuinely and profoundly shared some experience with another.

Besides the actual reading in class of many poems, I would suggest you do two things: first, while teaching everything you can and keeping free of it, teach that poetry is a mode of discourse that differs from logical exposition.

Bleak House is just the most astounding piece of work. There's huge, visionary poetry in it.

Breathe-in experience, breathe-out poetry.

But at the beginning it was clear to me that concrete poetry was peculiarly suited for using in public settings. This was my idea, but of course I never really much got the chance to do it.

But for me, being an editor I've been an editor of all kinds of books being an editor of poetry has been the way in which I could give a crucial part of my time to what I love most.

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

But I can only write what the muse allows me to write. I cannot choose, I can only do what I am given, and I feel pleased when I feel close to concrete poetry - still.

But I don't think that poetry is a good, to use a contemporary word, venue, for current events.

But I liked Yeats! That wild Irishman. I really loved his love of language, his flow. His chaotic ideas seemed to me just the right thing for a poet. Passion! He was always on the right side. He may be wrongheaded, but his heart was always on the right side. He wrote beautiful poetry.

But in the finished art of the song the use of words has no connection with the use of words in poetry.

But one does not make living writing poetry unless you're a professor, and one frankly doesn't get a lot of girls as a poet.

But poetry is a way of language, it is not its subject or its maker's background or interests or hobbies or fixations. It is nearer to utterance than history.

But poetry is my life. Poetry is what matters to me.

But the gravest difficulty, and perhaps the most important, in poetry meant solely for recitation, is the difficulty of achieving verbal beauty, or rather of making verbal beauty tell.

Children and lunatics cut the Gordian knot which the poet spends his life patiently trying to untie.

Children can write poetry and then, unless they're poets, they stop when reach puberty.

Children seem naturally drawn to poetry - it's some combination of the rhyme, rhythm, and the words themselves.

Clarity, clarity, surely clarity is the most beautiful thing in the world, A limited, limiting clarity I have not and never did have any motive of poetry But to achieve clarity.

Colloquial poetry is to the real art as the barber's wax dummy is to sculpture.

Concrete poets continue to turn out beautiful things, but to me they're more visual than oral, and they almost really belong on the wall rather than in a book. I haven't the least idea of where poetry is going.

Conversation may be compared to a lyre with seven chords - philosophy, art, poetry, love, scandal, and the weather.

Cut quarrels out of literature, and you will have very little history or drama or fiction or epic poetry left.

Dancing is the poetry of the foot.

Dealing with poetry is a daunting task, simply because the reason one does it as an editor at all is because one is constantly coming to terms with one's own understanding of how to understand the world.

Deals are my art form. Other people paint beautifully on canvas or write wonderful poetry. I like making deals, preferably big deals. That's how I get my kicks.

Deep feeling doesn't make for good poetry. A way with language would be a bit of help.

Distinctly American poetry is usually written in the context of one's geographic landscape, sometimes out of one's cultural myths, and often with reference to gender and race or ethnic origins.

Don't call my lyrics poetry. It's an insult to real poets.

Each memorable verse of a true poet has two or three times the written content.

Each word bears its weight, so you have to read my poems quite slowly.

Eloquence is the poetry of prose.

Epic poetry exhibits life in some great symbolic attitude. It cannot strictly be said to symbolize life itself, but always some manner of life.

Even the people who have had success and made money writing these books of fiction seem to feel the need to pretend it's no big deal, or part of a natural progression from poetry to fiction, but often it's really just about the money, the perceived prestige.

Even when poetry has a meaning, as it usually has, it may be inadvisable to draw it out... Perfect understanding will sometimes almost extinguish pleasure.

Every age has its own poetry in every age the circumstances of history choose a nation, a race, a class to take up the torch by creating situations that can be expressed or transcended only through poetry.

Every American poet feels that the whole responsibility for contemporary poetry has fallen upon his shoulders, that he is a literary aristocracy of one.

Every now and then I read a poem that does touch something in me, but I never turn to poetry for solace or pleasure in the way that I throw myself into prose.

Every one who has a heart, however ignorant of architecture he may be, feels the transcendent beauty and poetry of the mediaeval churches.

Every single soul is a poem.

Every so often I find some poems that are too good for the readers of The Atlantic because they are a little too involved with the nature of poetry, as such.

Everyone thinks they're going to write one book of poems or one novel.

Everything is complicated if that were not so, life and poetry and everything else would be a bore.

Everything one invents is true, you may be perfectly sure of that. Poetry is as precise as geometry.

Experience has taught me, when I am shaving of a morning, to keep watch over my thoughts, because, if a line of poetry strays into my memory, my skin bristles so that the razor ceases to act.

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

For a poet to depict a poet in poetry is a hazardous experiment in regarding one's own trade a sense of humour and a little wholesome cynicism are not amiss.

For awhile after you quit Keats all other poetry seems to be only whistling or humming.

For me concrete poetry was a particular way of using language which came out of a particular feeling, and I don't have control over whether this feeling is in me or not.

For me, poetry is a situation - a state of being, a way of facing life and facing history.

For me, poetry is always a search for order.

For me, prose walks, poetry dances.

For my part, if I consider poetry as an object, I maintain that it is born of the necessity of adding a vocal sound (speech) to the hammering of the first tribal music.

For poetry there exists neither large countries nor small. Its domain is in the heart of all men.

For there is a sound reasoning upon all flowers. For flowers are peculiarly the poetry of Christ.

For whatever reason, people, including very well-educated people or people otherwise interested in reading, do not read poetry.

For while the subjects of poetry are few and recurrent, the moods of man are infinitely various and unstable. It is the same in all arts.

France is not poetic she even feels, in fact, a congenital horror of poetry. Among the writers who use verse, those whom she will always prefer are the most prosaic.

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

Freedom is poetry, taking liberties with words, breaking the rules of normal speech, violating common sense. Freedom is violence.

From my music training, I knew that, some Spanish rhythms apart, 5/4 is a time signature used only in the modern era. Holst's Mars from the Planets is 5/4. But if you speak lines of poetry in that pattern you just end up hitting the off-beats. It's only when you add a rest - a sixth beat - that it sounds as it surely should sound.

From reading a previous answer, you know that I consider all those aspects to be part of American cultural myth and thus they figure into good American poetry, whether the poet is aware of what he is doing or not.

From what the moderns want, we must learn what poetry should become from what the ancients did, what poetry must be.

Genuine poetry can communicate before it is understood.

Gil Thorpe is a great diversion and is to book writing as poetry is to prose.

God is the perfect poet.

Great poetry is always written by somebody straining to go beyond what he can do.

Have you ever heard a good joke? If you've ever heard someone just right, with the right pacing, then you're already on the way to poetry. It's about using words in very precise ways and using gesture.

He fertilizes a phrase or a line of poetry for weeks and then gives birth to it in a speech.

He passes from lyric to epic poetry in order to speak about the world and the torment in the world through man, rationally and emotionally. The poet then becomes a danger.

He who draws noble delights from sentiments of poetry is a true poet, though he has never written a line in all his life.

Hence poetry is something more philosophic and of graver import than history, since its statements are rather of the nature of universals, whereas those of history are singulars.

High and low culture come together in all Post Modern art, and American poetry is not excluded from this.

How do poems grow? They grow out of your life.

How does one happen to write a poem: where does it come from? That is the question asked by the psychologists or the geneticists of poetry.

However, I learned something. I thought that if the young person, the student, has poetry in him or her, to offer them help is like offering a propeller to a bird.

However, if a poem can be reduced to a prose sentence, there can't be much to it.

However, poetry does not live solely in books or in school anthologies.

I always liked the magic of poetry but now I'm just starting to see behind the curtain of even the best poets, how they've used, tried and tested craft to create the illusion. Wonderful feeling of exhilaration to finally be there.

I always thought that poetry is the verdict that others give to a certain kind of writing. So to call yourself a poet is a kind of dangerous description. It's for others it's for others to use.

I always wrote poetry and stuff like that, so putting songs together wasn't that spectacular.

I am grateful for - though I can't keep up with - the flood of articles, theses, and textbooks that mean to share insight concerning the nature of poetry.

I am not ridiculing verbal mechanisms, dreams, or repressions as origins of poetry all three of them and more besides may have a great deal to do with it.

I am two fools, I know, for loving, and for saying so in whining poetry.

I began the way nearly everybody I ever heard of - I began writing poetry. And I find that to be quite usual with writers, their trying their hand at poetry.

I believe that all poetry is formal in that it exists within limits, limits that are either inherited by tradition or limits that language itself imposes.

I believe that the short story is as different a form from the novel as poetry is, and the best stories seem to me to be perhaps closer in spirit to poetry than to novels.

I believe the death of Bobby Kennedy was in many ways the death of decency in America. I think it was the death of manners and formality, the death of poetry and the death of a dream.

I came into music because I thought the presentation of poetry wasn't vibrant enough. So I merged improvised poetry with basic rock chords.

I came to poetry through the urgent need to denounce injustice, exploitation, humiliation. I know that's not enough to change the world. But to remain silent would have been a kind of intolerable complicity.

I can find some way to make poetry out of my life's experiences.

I cannot speak for more than an hour exclusively about poetry. At that point, life itself takes over again.

I certainly can't speak for all cultures or all societies, but it's clear that in America, poetry serves a very marginal purpose. It's not part of the cultural mainstream.

I certainly derived my skills as a prose writer from my scrutiny of poetry and of the individual word. But schools don't do things like that anymore - tracking words down to their roots.

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.

I could no more define poetry than a terrier can define a rat.

I credit poetry for making this space-walk possible.

I definitely wish to distinguish American poetry from British or other English language poetry.

I despair of ever writing excellent poetry.

I did know Ted Hughes and I partly wrote the book to explain to myself and others the complexities of a marriage that was for six years wonderfully productive of poetry and then ended in tragedy.

I did not have a very literary background. I came to poetry from the sciences and mathematics, and also through an interest in Japanese and Chinese poetry in translation.

I didn't want to deal in poetry. I got rid of that after a few months.

I do actually dabble in a bit of poetry! And I'm yet to pen a script, but it is something that I've been telling myself I want to do.

I do not go in search of poetry. I wait for poetry to visit me.

I do not see how a man can work on the frontiers of physics and write poetry at the same time. They are in opposition.

I don't know a better preparation for life than a love of poetry and a good digestion.

I don't like poetry that just slaps violent words on a canvas, as it were.

I don't like political poetry, and I don't write it. If this question was pointing towards that, I think it is missing the point of the American tradition, which is always apolitical, even when the poetry comes out of politically active writers.

I don't like to boast, but I have probably skipped more poetry than any other person of my age and weight in this country.

I don't live for poetry. I live far more than anybody else does.

I don't look on poetry as closed works. I feel they're going on all the time in my head and I occasionally snip off a length.

I don't think American poetry has gotten any better in the past 35 years. Oddly enough, creative writing programs seem to have been good for fiction, and I would not have predicted that.

I don't think Auden liked my poetry very much, he's very Anglican.

I don't think I've ever read poetry, ever.

I don't think it's always good to read lots of poetry.

I don't think poetry is something that can be taught. We can encourage young writers, but what you can't teach them is the very essence of poetry.

I don't think rap really fits in to 'American Idol' in the sense that I believe rap is an art form in itself more akin to poetry, more akin to drama, if you will.

I don't think the creative writing industry has helped American poetry.

I don't think you get to good writing unless you expose yourself and your feelings. Deep songs don't come from the surface they come from the deep down. The poetry and the songs that you are suppose to write, I believe are in your heart.

I don't write poetry and then strum some chords and then fit the words on top of the chords.

I find a lot of poetry to be narcissistic.

I found that it wasn't so oddball to like music and poetry and visual arts, they're kindred spirits.

I gave up on new poetry myself 30 years ago when most of it began to read like coded messages passing between lonely aliens in a hostile world.

I grew up in a bookless house - my parents didn't read poetry, so if I hadn't had the chance to experience it at school I'd never have experienced it. But I loved English, and I was very lucky in that I had inspirational English teachers, Miss Scriven and Mr. Walker, and they liked us to learn poems by heart, which I found I loved doing.

I grew up in this town, my poetry was born between the hill and the river, it took its voice from the rain, and like the timber, it steeped itself in the forests.

I guess I wanted to leave America for awhile. It wasn't that I wanted to become an expatriate, or just never come back, I needed some breathing room. I'd already been translating French poetry, I'd been to Paris once before and liked it very much, and so I just went.

I guess the two Manifesto, Communicating Vessels, Mad Love, and some of his poetry made a significant mark on me but as far as bringing a literary element into the music I see it as a much broader assimilation.

I had art as a major, along with English, French and History. I had dance, modern dance. In English I was allowed to write my own poetry, which I eventually got published.

I hardly remember how I started to write poetry. It's hard to imagine what I thought poetry could do.

I have always made my own rules, in poetry as in life - though I have tried of late to cooperate more with my family. I do, however, believe that without order or pattern poetry is useless.

I have always wanted what I have now come to call the voice of personal narrative. That has always been the appealing voice in poetry. It started for me lyrically in Shakespeare's sonnets.

I have always written poetry but I have never applied it to songwriting.

I have been enlightened. I have fallen into poetry and it has swallowed me up.

I have epiphanies all the time, because I'm always thinking. I'm a thinker. I'm always writing poetry, I'm always coming to conclusions.

I have experienced healing through other writers' poetry, but there's no way I can sit down to write in the hope a poem will have healing potential. If I do, I'll write a bad poem.

I have had much to learn from Sweden's poetry and, more especially, from her lyrics of the last generation.

I have nothing to say, I am saying it, and that is poetry.

I have piles of poetry books in the bathroom, on the stairs, everywhere. The only way to write poetry is to read it.

I have to admit that I had a lot of problems with poetry.

I have written some songs, but I would really call what I've done poetry at the end of the day, because I'll sit with my guitar for hours and hours on end for, like, a week and then I won't touch it for a month. I also just have no confidence. And you know what? I don't have time, because I'd rather be doing other things, like knitting.

I heard Nirvana, and discovered that songs could be like poetry, but a little bit more refined: you didn't have to have 20 verses to get your point across.

I knew what book we had to write, it was clear in my head it was journals and poetry. So I passed on their offer. I told my agent this is our vision, and no one's done it this way.

I know I'm not a wordsmith. And I don't write poetry. Sometimes I think I should, because it's really helpful. But I always wanted to write novels.

I learned to impersonate the kind of person that talks about poetry. It comes from teaching, I think.

I like poems that are little games.

I like the beauty of Faulkner's poetry. But I don't like his themes, not at all.

I like the way words go together and I like the gamesmanship of writing poetry. It is such a challenge.

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

I love painting and music, of course. I don't know nearly as much about them as I know about poetry. I've certainly been influenced by fiction. I was overwhelmed by War and Peace when I read it, and I didn't read it until I was in my late 20s.

I love Sufism as I love beautiful poetry, but it is not the answer. Sufism is like a mirage in the desert. It says to you, come and sit, relax and enjoy yourself for a while.

I love to compare different time frames. Poetry can evoke the time of the subject. By a very careful choice of words you can evoke an era, completely throw the poem into a different time scale.

I love to write poetry.

I never really liked poetry readings I liked to read poetry by myself, but I liked singing, chanting my lyrics to this jazz group.

I never think about poetry except when I'm writing it. I mean my poetry.

I never thought I'd be doing poetry books. I never really studied poetry. But the first one I did was after my mother died, and I realized that people sort of think and talk about her style and fashion, but in fact, what made her the person she was was really her love of reading and ideas.

I often imagine that the longer he studies English literature the more the Japanese student must be astonished at the extraordinary predominance given to the passion of love both in fiction and in poetry.

I published, privately, a collection of my serious poetry I had written over the years. I only published 50 copies, which I gave to friends, in a special deluxe edition. It was ridiculously expensive but I'm glad that I did it.

I read as much poetry as time allows and circumstance dictates: No heartache can pass without a little Dorothy Parker, no thunderstorm without W. H. Auden, no sleepless night without W. B. Yeats.

I realized poetry's the thing that I can do 'cause I can stick at it and work with tremendous intensity.

I really enjoy English and poetry and writing classes.

I see a resurgence of interest in poetry. I am less optimistic about the prospects for the arts when it comes to federal funding.

I see architecture not as Gropius did, as a moral venture, as truth, but as invention, in the same way that poetry or music or painting is invention.

I see no reason for calling my work poetry except that there is no other category in which to put it.

I see people who talk about America, and then undermine it by not paying attention to its soul, to its poetry. I see polarization, reductionism and superficiality.

I sometimes talk about the making of a poem within the poem.

I started off in England and very few people knew I was Australian. I mean, the clues were in the poems, but they didn't read them very carefully, and so for years and years I was considered completely part of the English poetry scene.

I still read Donne, particularly his love poems.

I think Ginsberg has done more harm to the craft that I honor and live by than anybody else by reducing it to a kind of mean that enables the most dubious practitioners to claim they are poets because they think, If the kind of thing Ginsberg does is poetry, I can do that.

I think I'm a very good reader of poetry, but obviously, like everybody, I have a set of criteria for reading poems, and I'm not shy about presenting them, so if people ask for my critical response to a poem, I tell them what works and why, and what doesn't work and why.

I think it comes from really liking literary forms. Poetry is very beautiful, but the space on the page can be as affecting as where the text is. Like when Miles Davis doesn't play, it has a poignancy to it.

I think it was T.S. Eliot who talked about good poetry being felt before it's understood. I believe that. There are some bands where I love their lyrics but I don't have a clue what they're on about.

I think poetry can help children deal with the other subjects on the curriculum by enabling them to see a subject in a new way.

I think poetry has lost an awful lot of its muscle because nobody knows any. Nobody has to memorize poetry.

I think poetry is best read to oneself.

I think that concrete poetry seems to have, as far as I can see, come to a kind of a dead end. It doesn't seem to be going any further than it went in its high period of about five or six years ago.

I think that great poetry is the most interesting and complex use of the poet's language at that point in history, and so it's even more exciting when you read a poet like Yeats, almost 100 years old now, and you think that perhaps no one can really top that.

I think that is where poetry reading becomes such an individual thing. I mean I have friend who like poets who just don't say anything to me at all, I mean they seem to me rather ordinary and pedestrian.

I think that it's more likely that in my 60s and 70s I will be writing poetry rather than fiction.

I think that one possible definition of our modern culture is that it is one in which nine-tenths of our intellectuals can't read any poetry.

I think that the job of poetry, its political job, is to refresh the idea of justice, which is going dead in us all the time.

I think that there is nothing, not even crime, more opposed to poetry, to philosophy, ay, to life itself than this incessant business.

I think that's what poetry does. It allows people to come together and identify with a common thing that is outside of themselves, but which they identify with from the interior.

I think the best American poetry is the poetry that utilizes the resources of poetry rather than exploits the defects or triumphs of the poet's personality.

I think the term poet is a very exalted term and should be applied to a man at the end of his work. When he looks back over the body of his work and he's written poetry then let the verdict be that he's a poet.

I think there are things in my story that have helped my creativity. Your father being killed, for instance, is one of the best things that could happen to a kid if he's going to write poetry or songs.

I think there was a revolution in poetry, associated chiefly with Eliot and Pound but maybe it is of the nature of revolutions or of the nature of history that their innovations should later come to look trivial or indistinguishable from technical tricks.

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.

I think we fool ourselves and really negate a great deal of history if we think that the oral history of poetry is shorter than the written history of poetry. It's not true. Poetry has a longer oral tradition than it does written.

I think we will always have the impulse towards visual poetry with us, and I wouldn't agree with Bly that it's a bad thing. It depends on the ability of the individual poet to do it well, and to make a shape which is interesting enough to hold your attention.

I think when kids just see well-crafted poetry, it's just obtuse to them. It's hard to relate to.

I thought to spend my declining years writing poetry and teaching - but that won't pay the Bergdorf's bill. I think I'll move to somewhere life is cheaper.

I thought we were gonna open up the world of poetry and music to all kinds of things, and yet, I can't really think of anyone who's done anything like it since.

I try to show what it is about language and music that enthralls, because I think those are the two elements of poetry.

I use rock and jazz and blues rhythms because I love that music. I hope my poetry has a relationship with good-time rock'n roll.

I used to joke that if acting didn't work out, poetry was my commonsense fallback.

I used to write sonnets and various things, and moved from there into writing prose, which, incidentally, is a lot more interesting than poetry, including the rhythms of prose.

I want a fever, in poetry: a fever, and tranquillity.

I want people to bow as they see me and say he is gifted with poetry, he has seen the presence of the creator.

I want to branch out. I want to write. I write poetry. I want to see my children grow up well.

I want to promote poetry to the point where you got all the baldhead kids running around doing poetry, getting the music out of the way and having only words, the spoken word, and then see what happens.

I want to write a book of poetry, as well as children's stories.

I wanted to reimagine the role, in a way that was respectful of its traditional responsibilities but made them part of a wider pattern of poetry about national incidents, events, preoccupations and to spend a great deal of time going to schools trying to demystify poetry.

I was a 16-year-old girl at one point, so of course I wrote poetry.

I was a visual artist primarily and a writer, even from a very young age. I wrote a lot of stories and poetry and... I had a desire to create always. And I always had a desire to show my work.

I was always interested in French poetry sort of as a sideline to my own work, I was translating contemporary French poets. That kind of spilled out into translation as a way to earn money, pay for food and put bread on the table.

I was always making up rhymes. But I never thought that poetry would become my life.

I was apprehensive. I feared every time I talked about poetry, it would be filtered through the lens of race, sex, and age.

I was excited by what my painter friends were doing, and they seemed to be interested in our poetry too, and that was a wonderful little, fizzy sort of world.

I was in Paris at an English-language bookstore. I picked up a volume of Dickinson's poetry. I came back to my hotel, read 2,000 of her poems and immediately began composing in my head. I wrote down the melodies even before I got to a piano.

I was influenced by surrealist poetry and painting as were thousands of other people, and it seems to me to have become a part of the way I write, but it's not.

I was kind of an outcast in school 'cause I always kept to myself and was writing poetry and then going on tour with my brother band all the time, so kids didn't know what to make of me.

I was one of those dark, quiet kids that wrote poetry.

I was reading the dictionary. I thought it was a poem about everything.

I was trained as an actress. But I wasn't a very convincing actress, so I started doing punk poetry and then fell into doing stand-up.

I was very interested in American poetry for many years. Much less now.

I will not leave a corner of my consciousness covered up, but saturate myself with the strange and extraordinary new conditions of this life, and it will all refine itself into poetry later on.

I wish our clever young poets would remember my homely definitions of prose and poetry that is, prose = words in their best order - poetry = the best words in the best order.

I wish you would read a little poetry sometimes. Your ignorance cramps my conversation.

I wonder if I ever thought of an ideal reader... I guess when I was in my 20s and in New York and maybe even in my early 30s, I would write for my wife Janice... mainly for my poet friends and my wife, who was very smart about poetry.

I work on words, mostly, toward them being poetry or short stories, and then some of those become songs. They all find their place in the world, but they all start off in the same place. I'm always painting and drawing as well, and it's an ongoing creative assignment.

I would define, in brief, the poetry of words as the rhythmical creation of Beauty.

I would say that American poetry has always been a poetry of personal testimony.

I write all the time - I write poetry, I love to write.

I write poetry in order to live more fully.

I wrote some bad poetry that I published in North African journals, but even as I withdrew into this reading, I also led the life of a kind of young hooligan.

I wrote The Green Eye of the Little Yellow God in five hours, but I had it all planned out. It isn't poetry and it does not pretend to be, but it does what it sets out to do.

I wrote things for the school's newspaper, and - like all teenagers - I dabbled in poetry.

I'd always loved poetry and I'd always loved writing music and composing music, but I hadn't thought of putting the two together until around that time.

I'd never really been content with just churning out these slim volumes every three or four years. I've always tried to think of poetry as an active ingredient in the language rather than just something that appears between the covers of thin books.

I'm as much influenced by Joseph Smith and the Mormons as I am, more so, than by Eliot. Actually, I'm much more influenced by the poetry of the Mormons.

I'm conscious of a series of circles working its way through my life. And at this particular moment I have come round to the beginning of my writing cycle. It begins with poetry. There's hardly a day that goes past on which I don't write poetry.

I'm fascinated by rap and by hip-hop. I think there's a lot of poetry in it. There's a lot of anger, a lot of social energy in it. And I think you'd better listen to it pretty carefully, 'cause it's important.

I'm hopefully touring with Colin Baker next year in Perfect Strangers. I have performed with Sylvia Simms in poetry and music evenings. I would love to do those for the rest of my career - they are so fun and witty.

I'm looking for a guy who makes you want to dance and write poetry all day long.

I'm not a great poetry fan.

I'm not a writer. I think I can write short stories and poetry, but film writing, brilliant film writing, is a talent - you can't just do it like that.

I'm not an academic, but I've always loved poetry since I've been small.

I'm not precisely saying that a really good board meeting at the MLA (Museums, Libraries and Archives Coucil) makes me want to go and write poetry, but there is a pleasure in doing that sort of thing well.

I'm not really one for fancy, big words and poetry, and the scriptwriters worked very hard on 'Paradise Lost' to translate it.

I'm not really quiet or shy. Ask any of my friends! But I always ground my poetry in life itself. Poetry is an art of language, though, so I am always aware of every word's meaning, or multiple meanings.

I'm perfectly happy when I look out at an audience and it's all women. I always think it's kind of odd, but then, more women than men, I think, read and write poetry.

I'm quite sure that most writers would sustain real poetry if they could, but it takes devotion and talent.

I've already written 300 space poems. But I look upon my ultimate form as being a poetic prose. When you read it, it appears to be prose, but within the prose you have embedded the techniques of poetry.

I've always had a love for poetry and when I got signed to a record label I thought, 'How odd that I'm doing a record before a book of poetry,'

I've always written, all my life, and when I was very young I developed an interest in poetry.

I've been writing a lot of poetry recently. It helps me think and work things out.

I've done a number of readings at poetry lounges in Vancouver and Los Angeles. I've compiled a book of poetry that's completed, and two others I'm working on.

I've got a book of poetry by the bed, one of these big collections that goes back to the Greeks and Romans.

I've never read a political poem that's accomplished anything. Poetry makes things happen, but rarely what the poet wants.

I've often entertained paranoid suspicions about my fridge and what it's been doing to my poetry when I'm not looking, but I never even considered that my fan was thinking about me.

I've written for every medium except poetry, at which I suck.

I've written poetry since I was in the first grade, and it wasn't until I was a little bit older that I realized poetry could be put to music and become a song.

I've written some poetry I don't understand myself.

If a line of poetry strays into my memory, my skin bristles so that the razor ceases to act.

If a poem is not memorable, there's probably something wrong. One of the problems of free verse is that much of the free verse poetry is not memorable.

If epic poetry is a definite species, the sagas do not fall within it.

If food is poetry, is not poetry also food?

If Galileo had said in verse that the world moved, the inquisition might have let him alone.

If I do a poetry reading I want people to walk out and say they feel better for having been there - not because you've done a comedy performance but because you're talking about your father dying or having young children, things that touch your soul.

If I feel physically as if the top of my head were taken off, I know that is poetry.

If I read a book and it makes my whole body so cold no fire can ever warm me, I know that is poetry.

If it is an imperfect word, no external circumstance can heighten its value as poetry.

If my poetry aims to achieve anything, it's to deliver people from the limited ways in which they see and feel.

If poetry alters the way in which the reader views the world, then it has had its desired effect.

If poetry should address itself to the same needs and aspirations, the same hopes and fears, to which the Bible addresses itself, it might rival it in distribution.

If the object of poetry is, to make men, then poetry is the heir of prophecy.

If there were no poetry on any day in the world, poetry would be invented that day. For there would be an intolerable hunger.

If there's no money in poetry, neither is there poetry in money.

If we ask a vague question, such as, 'What is poetry?' we expect a vague answer, such as, 'Poetry is the music of words,' or 'Poetry is the linguistic correction of disorder.'

If you cannot be a poet, be the poem.

If you don't mark your successes, the day your ship comes in could be just another day at the office, and there's no poetry in that.

If you go into a bar in most places in America and even say the word poetry, you'll probably get beaten up. But poetry is a really strong, beautiful form to me, and a lot of innovation in language comes from poetry.

If you read quickly to get through a poem to what it means, you have missed the body of the poem.

If you want to see mankind fully, look at a family. Within the family minds become organically one, and for this reason the family is total poetry.

If you were going to choose a way of making your way in this world and a place to start from, you might not choose poetry and you might not choose Huddersfield.

In a general way, I want to be a kind of flag-waver, bunting hanger-up, drum-beater, you name it, for poetry.

In Australia, not reading poetry is the national pastime.

In fact a lot of them I think are absolute baloney. Those Charles Olsens and people like that. At first I was interested in seeing what they were up to, what they were doing, why they were doing it. They never moved me in the way that one is moved by true poetry.

In fact, in lyric poetry, truthfulness becomes recognizable as a ring of truth within the medium itself.

In my late teenage years, I developed a real passion for it, and wrote a lot of poetry.

In my opinion, the most significant works of the twentieth century are those that rise beyond the conceptual tyranny of genre they are, at the same time, poetry, criticism, narrative, drama, etc.

In poetry everything which must be said is almost impossible to say well.

In poetry, you must love the words, the ideas and the images and rhythms with all your capacity to love anything at all.

In politics, as in poetry, it is sometimes true that it is darkest before dawn.

In rap music, even though the element of poetry is very strong, so is the element of the drum, the implication of the dance. Without the beat, its commercial value would certainly be more tenuous.

In the language of poetry, where every word is weighed, nothing is usual or normal. Not a single stone and not a single cloud above it. Not a single day and not a single night after it. And above all, not a single existence, not anyone's existence in this world.

In the past, poetry came in the form of spells and chants used to effect change.

In the television age, the key distinction is between the candidate who can speak poetry and the one who can only speak prose.

In the total darkness, poetry is still there, and it is there for you.

In the world of poetry there are would-be poets, workshop poets, promising poets, lovesick poets, university poets, and a few real poets.

Instead of trying to come up and pontificate on what literature is, you need to talk with children, to teachers, and make sure they get poetry in the curriculum early.

Is there any purpose to translating poetry? A poem does not contain information of importance, like a signpost or a warning notice.

It all has to do with art - writing, painting, things I've done for a long time but just never had enough time to pursue. I have poetry - things that are designed for songs, but they're always poems first.

It is a happy thing that there is no royal road to poetry. The world should know by this time that one cannot reach Parnassus except by flying thither.

It is a way we reassess our past. We can do that in poetry in ways we can't do in prose.

It is the hour to be drunken! to escape being the martyred slaves of time, be ceaselessly drunk. On wine, on poetry, or on virtue, as you wish.

It is the timber of poetry that wears most surely, and there is no timber that has not strong roots among the clay and worms.

It is true that short forms of poetry have been cultivated in the Far East more than in modern Europe but in all European literature short forms of poetry are to be found - indeed quite as short as anything in Japanese.

It is written on the arched sky it looks out from every star. It is the poetry of Nature it is that which uplifts the spirit within us.

It should here be added that poetry habitually takes the form of verse.

It takes most men five years to recover from a college education, and to learn that poetry is as vital to thinking as knowledge.

It was actually a women's writing group I belonged to in graduate school that gave me the courage to move from poetry to fiction.

It's always a combination of physics and poetry that I find inspiring. It's hard to wrap your head around things like the Hubble scope.

It's always good when women win things in fiction because it tends to be more male-dominated, unlike poetry, which is more equal.

It's bad poetry executed by people that can't sing. That's my definition of Rap.

It's just poetry, beauty and love. How hard can that be to act?

It's like I understand images and some people understand poetry.

It's necessary to start most work alone. But I'm tickled to death when I can pull somebody in or join someone, whether it's borrowing poetry or traveling with an associate.

It's not easy to define poetry.

It's something we, guys, have all done. Made tapes for girls, trying to impress them, to meet them on a shared plane of aesthetics. Read them someone else's poetry because they do poetry better than you could do it, because you're too awkward to do it.

Journalism is concerned with events, poetry with feelings. Journalism is concerned with the look of the world, poetry with the feel of the world.

Journalism wishes to tell what it is that has happened everywhere as though the same things had happened for every man. Poetry wishes to say what it is like for any man to be himself in the presence of a particular occurrence as though only he were alone there.

Lapped in poetry, wrapped in the picturesque, armed with logical sentences and inalienable words.

Lean your body forward slightly to support the guitar against your chest, for the poetry of the music should resound in your heart.

Let me read you some of my poetry. My poetry just takes me to another level.

Let my life as Poet begin. I want the life of the Poet. I have labored for over twelve years, one thousand pages of prose. Now, I want the easiness of poetry. The brevity of the poem.

Listen, real poetry doesn't say anything it just ticks off the possibilities. Opens all doors. You can walk through anyone that suits you.

Literature is a state of culture, poetry is a state of grace, before and after culture.

Living here on Earth, we breathe the rhythms of a universe that extends infinitely above us. When resonant harmonies arise between this vast outer cosmos and the inner human cosmos, poetry is born.

Love is the poetry of the senses.

Manifesting that order of poetry where we can at last grow up to that which we stored up as we grew.

Many attempts have been made by writers on art and poetry to define beauty in the abstract, to express it in the most general terms, to find some universal formula for it.

Marriage - a book of which the first chapter is written in poetry and the remaining chapters in prose.

Mathematics is, as it were, a sensuous logic, and relates to philosophy as do the arts, music, and plastic art to poetry.

Maybe it is something to do with age, but I have become fonder of poetry than of prose.

Meet some people who care about poetry the way you do. You'll have that readership. Keep going until you know you're doing work that's worthy. And then see what happens. That's my advice.

Money is a kind of poetry.

Money is everywhere but so is poetry. What we lack are the poets.

More people are reading poetry now than at any time in the history of the human race.

More people than ever are slowly but surely turning their ears toward poetry.

Most people can't tell now who wrote what. I like that blurring of identities within the band. because it becomes a unified thing that can't be related to other forms of historical poetry.

Most people ignore most poetry because most poetry ignores most people.

Most people read poetry listening for echoes because the echoes are familiar to them. They wade through it the way a boy wades through water, feeling with his toes for the bottom: The echoes are the bottom.

Most poetry in the modern age has retreated to the private sphere, turning its back on the political realm.

Music begins to atrophy when it departs too far from the dance... poetry begins to atrophy when it gets too far from music.

Music has a poetry of its own, and that poetry is called melody.

Music is more emotional than prose, more revolutionary than poetry. I'm not saying I've got the answers, just a of questions that I don't hear other artists asking.

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.

My dad is a Jack Nicholson lookalike and a frustrated performer, my mother's into reading and poetry. I suppose the thing I owe them most is my confidence.

My father had wanted to name me for Dylan Thomas. He had seen him speak on one of those drunken poetry tours he did.

My favorite subject probably was math. I love math. Figures just intrigue me. I was really good at math. English probably was my worst subject. But I used to write a lot of poetry. I used to write poetry all the time.

My films are an extension of my poetry, using the white screen like the white page to be filled with images.

My friends never talk to me about my poetry because they're embarrassed that I write it or they're embarrassed by what I write about which are not such extraordinarily terrifying things, but they are the state of human existence.

My mother asked me what I wanted for my birthday, so I said I wanted to read poetry with her.

My mother carried on and supported us her ambition had been to write poetry and songs.

My next project is to get back to that. Actually, to learn how to write poetry. I'm not kidding.

My obsession with time informs my poetry so completely it is hard for me to summarize it. We want time to pass, for new things to happen to us, we want to hold on to certain moments, we don't want our lives to end.

Naming a baby is an act of poetry, for many people the only creative moment of their lives.

Narrative art, the novel, from Murasaki to Proust, has produced great works of poetry.

Never fear: Thank Home, and Poetry, and the Force behind both.

No art form points like poetry to this originality of language as to its essential and abiding concern.

No poem is easily grasped so why should any reader expect fast results?

No poems can please for long or live that are written by water drinkers.

No, what I should really like to do right now, in the full blaze of lights, before this illustrious assembly, is to shower every one of you with gifts, with flowers, with offerings of poetry - to be young once more, to ride on the crest of the wave.

Nobody ever told me what to read, or ever put poetry in my way.

Nobody, I think, ought to read poetry, or look at pictures or statues, who cannot find a great deal more in them than the poet or artist has actually expressed. Their highest merit is suggestiveness.

None but a poet can write a tragedy. For tragedy is nothing less than pain transmuted into exaltation by the alchemy of poetry.

Nothing truly convincing - which would possess thoroughness, vigor, and skill - has been written against the ancients as yet especially not against their poetry.

Now I think poetry will save nothing from oblivion, but I keep writing about the ordinary because for me it's the home of the extraordinary, the only home.

Of course a poem is a two-way street. No poem is any good if it doesn't suggest to the reader things from his own mind and recollection that he will read into it, and will add to what the poet has suggested. But I do think poetry readings are very important.

On a summer night it can be lovely to sit around outside with friends after dinner and, yes, read poetry to each other. Keats and Yeats will never let you down, but it's differently exciting to read the work of poets who are still walking around out there.

On July 26, 1916, I announced to all my friends in America that from now on I resolved to write no more poems in the classical language, and to begin my experiments in writing poetry in the so-called vulgar tongue of the people.

On the other hand, if there's an underlying core of poetry that I go to, I go to the sea. I've lived on the sea all my life. I live on the sea in Cape Breton.

Once every five hundred years or so, a summary statement about poetry comes along that we can't imagine ourselves living without.

One can't write for all readers. A poet cannot write for people who don't like poetry.

One difference between poetry and lyrics is that lyrics sort of fade into the background. They fade on the page and live on the stage when set to music.

One has only as much morality as one has philosophy and poetry.

One merit of poetry few persons will deny: it says more and in fewer words than prose.

One of the most powerful devices of poetry is the use of distortions. You can go from talking about the way a minute passes to the way a century passes, or a lifetime.

One will never again look at a birch tree, after the Robert Frost poem, in exactly the same way.

Only in dreams, in poetry, in play do we sometimes arrive at what we were before we were this thing that, who knows, we are.

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

Our most famous writers are Faulkner and Eudora Welty and Flannery O'Connor. It would make sense that the poetry would reflect some of those same values, some of the same techniques.

Pain is filtered in a poem so that it becomes finally, in the end, pleasure.

Painting is silent poetry, and poetry is painting that speaks.

Part of what we love about poetry is the fact that it seems ancient, that it has an authority of ancient language and ancient form, and that it's timeless, that it reaches back.

PC stuff just lowers the general acceptance of good work and replaces it with bogus poetry that celebrates values that in themselves are probably quite worthy.

People who read poetry, for example, like the feel, the heft and the smell of a book.

People wish to be poets more than they wish to write poetry, and that's a mistake. One should wish to celebrate more than one wishes to be celebrated.

Perhaps no person can be a poet, or even enjoy poetry, without a certain unsoundness of mind.

Perhaps there is an idea among Japanese students that one general difference between Japanese and Western poetry is that the former cultivates short forms and the latter longer ones, gut this is only in part true.

Personality is everything in art and poetry.

Plot, rules, nor even poetry, are not half so great beauties in tragedy or comedy as a just imitation of nature, of character, of the passions and their operations in diversified situations.

Poetic talent doesn't operate in a vacuum. There is a spirit of Polish poetry.

Poetry a criticism of life under the conditions fixed for such a criticism by the laws of poetic truth and poetic beauty.

Poetry always runs away from you - it's very difficult to grasp it, and every time you read it, depending on your conditions, you will have a different grasp of it. Whereas with a novel, once you have read it, you have grasped it.

Poetry and consumption are the most flattering of diseases.

Poetry and music are very good friends. Like mommies and daddies and strawberries and cream - they go together.

Poetry and prayer are very similar.

Poetry and progress are like two ambitious men who hate one another with an instinctive hatred, and when they meet upon the same road, one of them has to give place.

Poetry asks people to have values, form opinions, care about some other part of experience besides making money and being successful on the job.

Poetry being the sign of that which all men desire, even though the desire be unconscious, intensity of life or completeness of experience, the universality of its appeal is a matter of course.

Poetry brings all possible experience to the same degree: a degree in the consciousness beyond which the consciousness itself cannot go.

Poetry can't cure cancer, but it can save your life until you die.

Poetry comes alive to me through recitation.

Poetry consists in a rhyming dictionary and things seen.

Poetry criticism at its worst today is mean in spirit and spiteful in intent, as if determined to inflict the wound that will spur the artist to new heights if it does not cripple him or her.

Poetry does not consist of words alone there must be sentiment and fancy, combination and arrangement.

Poetry fettered, fetters the human race. Nations are destroyed or flourish in proportion as their poetry, painting, and music are destroyed or flourish.

Poetry for me is as much a spiritual practice as sexual ecstasy is.

Poetry had far better imply things than preach them directly... in the open pulpit her voice grows hoarse and fails.

Poetry has been to me its own exceeding great reward it has given me the habit of wishing to discover the good and beautiful in all that meets and surrounds me.

Poetry has done enough when it charms, but prose must also convince.

Poetry has the virtue of being able to say twice as much as prose in half the time, and the drawback, if you do not give it your full attention, of seeming to say half as much in twice the time.

Poetry heals the wounds inflicted by reason.

Poetry involves the mysteries of the irrational perceived through rational words.

Poetry is a beautiful way of spoiling prose, and the laborious art of exchanging plain sense for harmony.

Poetry is a deal of joy and pain and wonder, with a dash of the dictionary.

Poetry is a matter of life, not just a matter of language.

Poetry is a mere drug, Sir.

Poetry is a mirror which makes beautiful that which is distorted.

Poetry is a mixture of common sense, which not all have, with an uncommon sense, which very few have.

Poetry is a natural energy resource of our country.It has no energy crisis, possessing a potential that will last as long as the country. Its power is equal to that of any country in the world.

Poetry is a phantom script telling how rainbows are made and why they go away.

Poetry is a sort of homecoming.

Poetry is a succession of questions which the poet constantly poses.

Poetry is a sword of lightning, ever unsheathed, which consumes the scabbard that would contain it.

Poetry is a totally different art than film.

Poetry is a way of taking life by the throat.

Poetry is adolescence fermented, and thus preserved.

Poetry is all nouns and verbs.

Poetry is all that is worth remembering in life.

Poetry is also the physical self of the poet, and it is impossible to separate the poet from his poetry.

Poetry is an art, and chief of the fine art the easiest to dabble in, the hardest in which to reach true excellence.

Poetry is an art, the easiest to dabble in, but the hardest to reach true excellence.

Poetry is an echo, asking a shadow to dance.

Poetry is an orphan of silence. The words never quite equal the experience behind them.

Poetry is as precise a thing as geometry.

Poetry is at least an elegance and at most a revelation.

Poetry is at the centre of my life, too, emotionally speaking, and intellectually speaking - it's just that I'm one of those people who enjoy doing other stuff as well.

Poetry is but another form of inquiry into the nature of phenomena, using with its own unique procedures and tools.