Poetry quotes

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

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.

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

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

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

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

Poetry seems to have been eliminated as a literary genre, and installed instead, as a kind of spiritual aerobic exercise - nobody need read it, but anybody can do it.

When you translate poetry in particular, you're obliged to look at how the writer with whom you're working puts together words, sentences, phrases, the triple tension between the line of verse, the syntax and the sentence.

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.

The music just tends to be a vehicle for that poetry.

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

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.

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.

The office of poetry is not to make us think accurately, but feel truly.

In Australia, not reading poetry is the national pastime.

Poetry is one of the destinies of speech... One would say that the poetic image, in its newness, opens a future to language.

The romanticised life, where all the great poetry and music and art of the world comes from, is great but it requires a lot of self-indulgence.

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

While I've had a great distaste for what's usually called song in modern poetry or for what's usually called music, I really don't think of speech as so far from song.

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