I wanted to become a writer and felt that poetry was perfected language, so having it in my subconscious mind would make the music of language always available to me.
I’m happy to be a writer – of prose, poetry, every kind of writing. Every person in the world who isn’t a recluse, hermit or mute uses words. I know of no other art form that we always use.
The charge frequently leveled against poetry – that it is difficult, obscure, hermetic and whatnot – indicates not the state of poetry but, frankly, the rung of the evolutionary ladder on which society is stuck.
If what distinguishes us from other species is speech, then poetry, which is the supreme linguistic operation, is our anthropological – indeed, genetic – goal.
Writing criticism is to writing fiction and poetry as hugging the shore is to sailing in the open sea.
Poetry was my dirty little secret when I was a fiction writer at Iowa, and then fiction became my dirty little secret when I started writing more poetry and working for ‘Rookie’.
Poetry isn’t just different from prose, it’s more important for the human species.
And, I mean, I think poetry does need to be met to some extent, especially, I guess, 19th century poetry, and for me, it’s just been so worth the effort. It’s like I’m planting a garden in my head.
Poetry remembers that it was an oral art before it was a written art.
Writing dark poetry was always my escape.
For while the subjects of poetry are few and recurrent, the moods of man are infinitely various and unstable. It is the same in all arts.
When I was writing pretty poor poetry, this girl with midnight black hair told me to go on.
Poetry, whatever the manifest content of the poem, is always a violation of the rationalism and morality of bourgeois society.
Poetry is a mixture of common sense, which not all have, with an uncommon sense, which very few have.
This proves that great lyric poetry can die, be reborn, die again, but will always remain one of the most outstanding creations of the human soul.
There may be more poetry than justice in poetic justice.
Poetry has, in a way, been my bridge to my acting career.
Poetry is, first and last, language – the rest is filler.
Poetry is partly sympathy, don’t you think? If it’s any good, it gets people to think about others’ points of view.
A lot of people feel that the realm of poetry and the realm of the lyric is personal feeling and should rise above politics, which, in fact, good poetry has never done.
I’ve always had a love for poetry and when I got signed to a record label I thought, ‘How odd that I’m doing a record before a book of poetry,’
In Arlington, people would laugh at you if you tried to get people to look at your drawings or listen to your poetry. It was like you thought you were special.
I think that there is nothing, not even crime, more opposed to poetry, to philosophy, ay, to life itself than this incessant business.
The flame that is naturally clear always gives the most light and heat. If I could blend my talent for poetry and music into one, the light would burn still clearer, and I might go far.
Unfortunately, poetry is not born in noise, in crowds, or on a bus. There have to be four walls and the certainty that the telephone will not ring. That’s what writing is all about.
