Every age has its own poetry; in every age the circumstances of history choose a nation, a race, a class to take up the torch by creating situations that can be expressed or transcended only through poetry.
I find a lot of poetry very disappointing, but I do have poets that I go back to. One book of poetry that I’d like to mention is ‘The Exchange’ by Sophie Cabot Black. Her poems are difficult without being too difficult.
In 1971, when I was 29, I wrote my first volume of poetry. I am a poet, and I have published four books of my poems.
The first function of poetry is to tell the truth, to learn how to do that, to find out what you really feel and what you really think.
Some honor Cummings as the granddaddy of all American innovators in poetry and ascribe to him a diverse progeny that includes virtually any poet who considers the page a field and allows silence to be part of poetry’s expressiveness.
The poetry that sustains me is when I feel that, for a minute, the clouds have parted and I’ve seen ecstasy or something.
In the past, poetry came in the form of spells and chants used to effect change.
Especially in the world today, where science rightfully is so important in terms of technology, innovation, telecom, Internet, fighting diseases, I think it’s equally important that poetry and painting have their share of support.
We have a motto at Naropa: ‘Keep the world safe for poetry.’ It’s humorous but has some real bite to it. If the world is safe for poetry, it can be safe for many other things.
Lucknow, as far as I have heard, is always known for its culture, literature and poetry. So it has set a cultural benchmark for the entire country.
I studied poetry in college and for a year in an MFA program. As time went on, my poems got more and more complicated. What I was really trying to do was tell stories.
My obsession with time informs my poetry so completely it is hard for me to summarize it. We want time to pass, for new things to happen to us, we want to hold on to certain moments, we don’t want our lives to end.
Poetry is necessary, but is the poet?
Poetry at its best can do you a lot of harm.
The drama is complete poetry. The ode and the epic contain it only in germ; it contains both of them in a state of high development, and epitomizes both.
Poetry must have something in it that is barbaric, vast and wild.
In ‘A Poetics of Optics,’ Equi writes that ‘all images bank on alchemy.’ This idea captures her fundamental sense of poetry as turning common material into something rare and valuable.
Often people, when they’re confronted with a poem, it’s like someone who keep saying ‘what is the meaning of this? What is the meaning of this?’ And that dulls us to the other pleasures poetry offers.
The gross heathenism of civilization has generally destroyed nature, and poetry, and all that is spiritual.
I started out as a writer. Poetry and prose and also kind of satirical David Sedaris-esque stuff.
Poetry has been to me its own exceeding great reward; it has given me the habit of wishing to discover the good and beautiful in all that meets and surrounds me.
Usually, I am a compulsive person, and I need – sometimes urgently – to paint… Painting is close to poetry, is a kind of poetry expressed visually. It has to be spontaneous, rapid – at least in my case.
I have piles of poetry books in the bathroom, on the stairs, everywhere. The only way to write poetry is to read it.
Poetry has always been made to seem kind of cultish. But the truth is, everybody really loves it! It’s much more mainstream than anyone thought.
It is a way we reassess our past. We can do that in poetry in ways we can’t do in prose.
