Teach your children poetry; it opens the mind, lends grace to wisdom and makes the heroic virtues hereditary.
There’s always a need at a critical time for poetry.
I can recite poetry, but I cannot write it.
All slang is metaphor, and all metaphor is poetry.
Listen, real poetry doesn’t say anything; it just ticks off the possibilities. Opens all doors. You can walk through any one that suits you.
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.
Most people ignore most poetry because most poetry ignores most people.
Poetry is a sort of homecoming.
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.
Yet, it is true, poetry is delicious; the best prose is that which is most full of poetry.
I really liked ‘Blk Girl Art.’ It’s like a manifesto saying why I create, whether it’s poetry or music.
Poetry is as precise a thing as geometry.
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.
What is poetry which does not save nations or people?
That’s one of the great things about poetry; one realises that one does one’s little turn – that you’re just part of the great crop, as it were.
First of all, I’m not a singer or rapper. I’m an artiste. Besides singing, I produce music, dance, write poetry, and sometimes I paint as well.
The experimental poetry thing is not my thing. It’s a programme of the avant-garde: basically a refusal of the kind of poetry I write.
Well you can’t teach the poetry, but you can teach the craft.
There is no gender to my music. There’s no male or female voice, no trite lyrics or poetry. It’s much more abstract, so it lives with you longer.
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.
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.
Poetry is not a genre in harmony with the modern world; its innermost nature is hostile or indifferent to the dogmas of modern times, progress and the cult of the future.
Public school teachers from every corner of America post classroom project requests on DonorsChoose.org. Requests range from pencils for a poetry writing unit to violins for a school recital to microscope slides for a biology class.
The sentences I write have their roots in song and poetry, and take their bearings from music and painting, as much as from the need to impart mere information, or mirror anything. I am not a realist writer, even if I seem like one.
I learn poetry, learn text, and that really keeps you alive.
