I write poetry, and I put it to a beat – I mean, that’s what they call rap.
Piercing minds go mute around poetry. It is imagined to be overly technical, like advanced arithmetic; otherworldly, priestess-like; suffocatingly personal; excessively decorative; exhaustingly bourgeois or tiringly avant-garde.
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 realised I’d spent a lot of time in my poetry trying to find a way of talking about that whereof we cannot speak.
You will not find poetry anywhere unless you bring some of it with you.
My mother was a washerwoman – or a woman that cleaned houses in Texas… in Plano, Texas – who always loved poetry and always loved stories.
What is the point of narrating poetry when the listener can’t appreciate and enjoy the meaning?
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.
I like cups of tea and reading books and poetry and old people things.
I’m reading a lot of poetry because it’s a lot easier to dip in and dip out when you’ve got 10 minutes to yourself.
Growing up as a kid, I took creative writing classes, and I was always into poetry.
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.
If our hearts are ready for anything, we are touched by the beauty and poetry and mystery that fill our world.
There are men who can write poetry, and there are men who can read balance sheets. The men who can read balance sheets cannot write.
Poetry is a political act because it involves telling the truth.
I think poetry is best read to oneself.
Poetry can do a lot of things to people. I mean it can improve your imagination. It can take you to new places. It can give you this incredible form of verbal pleasure.
An experienced reader uses the poem as an agent of inquiry. This makes poetry very exciting, unstable, and interactive.
Poetry is a special use of language that opens onto the real. The business of the poet is truth telling, which is why in the Celtic tradition no one could be a teacher unless he or she was a poet.
Sometimes poetry, it is incomprehensible. But we need incomprehensible stuff! It is very healthy to talk about incomprehensible things! It is very healthy! We need it!
The one thing they didn’t tell you at Iowa is how hard it is to make a living writing fiction and poetry.
I see poetry as spiritual medicine.
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.
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.
No poetry that I’m aware of, however bad or glorious, has ever left somebody a worse person than they were before they read it.
