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.
The Vietnam War and the Iraq war, in different ways, both made me feel like I could not not address them. I’m very doubtful about the usefulness of poetry to do that.
I’m not a great poetry fan.
We are looking to brands for poetry and for spirituality, because we’re not getting those things from our communities or from each other.
Poetry involves the mysteries of the irrational perceived through rational words.
Poetry is emotion, passion, love, grief – everything that is human. It is not for zombies by zombies.
I’ve never written poetry. I’m not a poet, but I think the nearest you get is either the short story or the novella, in that you can’t waste a word. There is no hiding place: everything’s got to be seen to relate, and the prose counts.
I want to be the best advocate and promoter for poetry that I can be.
Prose, poetry, and drawings stand side by side in a very democratic way in my work.
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.
Everything is complicated; if that were not so, life and poetry and everything else would be a bore.
Suddenly, everyone wanted to talk to me, it seemed. And not about my poetry: it was my dyslexia they were most interested in.
There is no Frigate like a book to take us lands away nor any coursers like a page of prancing Poetry.
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.
The idea that myth is the opposite of knowledge, or the opposite of truth, is simply to disallow it. It is like saying poetry is the opposite of truth.
I believe in the power of poetry, which gives me reasons to look ahead and identify a glint of light.
I started reading seriously after I was in college. I read comic books. I read every ‘Power Man’ and ‘Iron Fist’ that ever came out. I had a teacher introduce me to poetry, and that kind of woke me up.
The true spirit of delight, the exaltation, the sense of being more than Man, which is the touchstone of the highest excellence, is to be found in mathematics as surely as poetry.
I don’t think I’ve ever read poetry, ever.
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.
I’m a failed poet. Reading poetry helps me to see the world differently, and I try to infuse my prose with figurative language, which goes against the trend in fiction.
I believe that poetry should communicate.
There is no one more deserving of a place in Poets’ Corner. Ted Hughes introduced a new kind of landscape into English poetry. The most compelling aspect of his work was his intimacy with nature.
More modern poetry is written than read.
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.
