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.
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.
Poetry is a phantom script telling how rainbows are made and why they go away.
I wrote poetry before I wrote songs, and T.S. Eliot was my inspiration. I love his honesty and try to bring that to my own songwriting.
The musician is perhaps the most modest of animals, but he is also the proudest. It is he who invented the sublime art of ruining poetry.
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.
I think of myself as an ambassador of the arts. In my heart of hearts, I know the world would be a more peaceful, tender place if we were more moved by the poetry around us.
I approach video games the same way I approach theatre, filmmaking, poetry, or painting. I wish more people would take that point of view. It would help the industry to move on.
The business of the poet is not to find new emotions, but to use the ordinary ones and, in working them up into poetry, to express feelings which are not in actual emotions at all.
Dismissals of poetry are nothing new. It’s easy to dismiss poetry if one has not read much of it.
I’ve written poetry since I was a kid. As the years went on, I got into writing stories and screenplays, but I always, always kept up with poetry as well.
I like to write, I like to reflect, and not just poetry, I like to write my thoughts down. I think it’s good for people who are more introspective, and it helps me get a better understanding of myself.
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.
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.
As anthropomorphic and surreal people have said my early writing was, to me it was really stock and almost banal in the sense that it was just description, the poetry of comparing: ‘Your feet are like A, and your eyes like B.’
There’s a fierce practicality and empiricism which the whole imaginative, lyrical aspect of poetry comes from.
Poetry, I feel, is a tyrannical discipline. You’ve got to go so far so fast in such a small space; you’ve got to burn away all the peripherals.
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.
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.
The middle class is doing fine in fiction. But it’s not what gets me going. I love the working class, and everyone from it I’ve met, and think they’re incredibly witty, inventive – there’s a lot of poetry there.
I’ve written poetry most of my life.
When you are writing literary writing, you are communicating something subtextual with emotions and poetry. The prose has to have a voice; it’s not just typing. It takes a while to get that voice.
I did go through a phase of reading a lot of poetry and getting heavily into philosophy and ended up writing things that weren’t really in a musical format, which I put to some very electronic-based backing.
Poetry is rather an approach to things, to life, than it is typographical production.
Poetry and art are key influences in changing how we look at taboos.
