Every one who has a heart, however ignorant of architecture he may be, feels the transcendent beauty and poetry of the mediaeval churches.
It’s not easy to define poetry.
We simply have not kept in touch with poetry.
Poetry is not an issue of form and enjambments. Poetry, as the word is classically used, has to do with sound and sense. It can be rhyme. It can be rhythm, pace, breath.
With fiction, I tend to get to my desk and start writing. Poetry I write in my head, often while walking, so that my poems have an organic quality, hopefully.
Shakespeare is a seminal story-teller. I don’t think he imagined he was writing classics or that he was writing great poetry. I don’t think he dreamt his work would be staged 400 years after he died.
I have been enlightened. I have fallen into poetry and it has swallowed me up.
I like writing love songs. I really like romantic poetry.
Americans have been tremendously fortunate in poetry, regarding both the quantity and quality of poetry produced. Unfortunately, it remains in schools and universities; it is not widely distributed.
There’s something about beautiful moments in sports that alters our experience of time. And I’d say the same thing about poetry and gardening. Gardening slows me down. I want to stop and observe everything.
I love all kinds of music. My dad’s from London, so he loves David Bowie, the Stones, The Clash. I grew up with that influence while loving poetry and loving all kinds of current music.
Rap is poetry to music, like beatniks without beards and bongos.
Nowadays, what an award gives is a sense of solidarity with the poetry guild, as it were: sustenance coming from the assent of your peers on the judging panel.
Most people read poetry listening for echoes because the echoes are familiar to them. They wade through it the way a boy wades through water, feeling with his toes for the bottom: The echoes are the bottom.
I began to write poetry in high school, and would ride miles over sandy roads in the fine hills around Cedar Rapids, repeating the lines over and over until I had them right, making some of the rhythm of the horse help.
In the United States, in poetry workshops, it’s now quite a thing to make graduate students learn poems by heart.
In a general way, I want to be a kind of flag-waver, bunting hanger-up, drum-beater, you name it, for poetry.
On the other hand, if there’s an underlying core of poetry that I go to, I go to the sea. I’ve lived on the sea all my life. I live on the sea in Cape Breton.
Leaving college early to play pro football was the best thing that happened to me. I got to drop the most boring poetry class. Dumbest thing I did was being in that class.
Yes, I love poetry, both to read and to write it. A first love.
I guess the thing that I’m most proud of is that I kept on writing poetry. I understand that poetry is sort of the source of everything I do. It’s the source of my creativity.
Prose talks and poetry sings.
While I’ve had a great distaste for what’s usually called song in modern poetry or for what’s usually called music, I really don’t think of speech as so far from song.
Translated poetry filled the no-man’s-land between my own work and other writers’, and I found this fascinating to explore.
The poetry of a people comes from the deep recesses of the unconscious, the irrational and the collective body of our ancestral memories.
