They need to learn poetry. They don’t need to learn about poetry. They don’t need to be told how to interpret poetry. They don’t need to be told how to understand poetry. They need to learn it.
There is a wonderful Hungarian literature, especially in lyric poetry.
Reading a piece of poetry with no beat in front of 20 people is way more challenging than rocking for 10,000 people.
In a way I spend my entire life stealing from everything – from the past, from cities I love, from where I grew up – grabbing things, taking not only from architecture but from Italy, art, writing, poetry, music.
Thanks partly to the kind of poets that we now have and partly to funding, there’s been a gigantic shift in the way poetry is perceived… Poems on the Underground, poets in schools, football clubs, zoos.
If there were no poetry on any day in the world, poetry would be invented that day. For there would be an intolerable hunger.
A man of eighty has outlived probably three new schools of painting, two of architecture and poetry and a hundred in dress.
Poetry fettered, fetters the human race. Nations are destroyed or flourish in proportion as their poetry, painting, and music are destroyed or flourish.
Writing poetry makes you intensely conscious of how words sound, both aloud and inside the head of the reader. You learn the weight of words and how they sound to the ear.
Poetry is a sword of lightning, ever unsheathed, which consumes the scabbard that would contain it.
Poetry is but another form of inquiry into the nature of phenomena, using with its own unique procedures and tools.
I aspire to a poetry of great formal integrity, deep passion and high intellect, and I have many models for how to do that.
I guess the two Manifesto, Communicating Vessels, Mad Love, and some of his poetry made a significant mark on me but as far as bringing a literary element into the music I see it as a much broader assimilation.
With me poetry has not been a purpose, but a passion.
Every American poet feels that the whole responsibility for contemporary poetry has fallen upon his shoulders, that he is a literary aristocracy of one.
When I get depressed, I try to get something for the terrible sadness that comes over me and create something in terms of poetry.
I have not the slightest pretension to call my verses poetry; I write now and then for no other purpose than to relieve depression or to improve my English.
Local images have one kind of reality. ‘U.S. 1’ will, I hope, have that kind and another, too. Poetry can extend the document.
Not every gay person recites poetry or has read Keats. You can get readers through anything if the characters are complicated. You can’t dismiss Josey Wales’ quite liberal worldview.
I wrote poetry and short stories. I would send them to magazines; they wouldn’t get in. But short stories are how I found philosophy and how I’d understand the world.
Surrealism is not a poetry but a poetics, and even more, and more decisively, a world vision.
Now, to read poetry at all is to have an ideal anthology of one’s own, and in that possession to be incapable of content with the anthologies of all the world besides.
We are supposed to write poetry to keep the gods alive.
Why should poetry have to make sense?
Some people ask, ‘How do you attract the young and so many different people when your poetry is complicated and different?’ I say, ‘My accomplishment is that my readers trust me and accept my suggestions for change.’
