Too many people in the modern world view poetry as a luxury, not a necessity like petrol. But to me it’s the oil of life.
My own, purely personal view is that reading, study, poetry, and scientific experiment might be more rewarding than a job or children, so I would never advise anyone against university if they’re going for the right reasons.
Poetry carries the imagery which is large enough for the kind of life we want for ourselves.
Every now and then I read a poem that does touch something in me, but I never turn to poetry for solace or pleasure in the way that I throw myself into prose.
Slowly poetry becomes visual because it paints images, but it is also musical: it unites two arts into one.
I’ve always felt that poetry was particularly erotic, more than prose was… I say that you read poems not with your eyes and not with your ears, but with your mouth. You taste it.
Hip-hop is about the brilliance of pavement poetry.
Poetry is a vocation. It is not a career but a calling.
All one’s inventions are true, you can be sure of that. Poetry is as exact a science as geometry.
I’ve always been a fan of poetry. I grew up with Lawrence Ferlinghetti and the Beat poets. I really followed that stuff for a while. I just love the way people threw words around like they were painting.
When you write, it’s just a much more crystalline, compressed version of the voice you think with – though not the one you speak with. I think your writing voice is your laser-guided missile. It’s the poetry part of you.
By definition, poetry works with qualities and dynamics that mainstream society is reluctant to face head-on. It’s an interesting phenomenon that by necessity, poetry is just below the radar.
I do not go in search of poetry. I wait for poetry to visit me.
Many great works of art, poetry, and music are inspired by astral memories. The desire to do noble, beautiful things here on Earth is also often a carryover of astral experiences between a person’s earth lives.
As civilization advances, poetry almost necessarily declines.
I’m moved by people who see the world differently than others. People who see the world with a longing for its poetry often can be broken people.
Everybody interprets things differently with their own perception, and I want poetry to pull out of them their own feelings.
Literature is a state of culture, poetry is a state of grace, before and after culture.
I was writing poetry, and the Mountain Goats was an outgrowth of that.
There was a time when poetry often made its way to vinyl; take a deep dive, for example, into the beat poets’ countercultural albums of the 1950s to ‘80s.
Let’s detox our cluttered academic brain. That’s what the poet does. People call it daydreaming, detoxing our minds and taking care of that clutter. It’s being able to let in call letters from the poetry universe.
Music is closer to poetry than anything.
I love poetry and I’ve kept everything I’ve written.
Poetry is not Irish or any other nationality; and when writers such as Messrs. Clarke, Farren and the late F. R. Higgins pursue Irishness as a poetic end, they are merely exploiting incidental local colour.
Sometimes the beauty is easy. Sometimes you don’t have to try at all. Sometimes you can hear the wind blow in a handshake. Sometimes there’s poetry written right on the bathroom wall.
