Poetry should be able to reach everybody, and it should be able to appeal to all levels of understanding.
Magna Carta has become totemic. It is in the comedy of Tony Hancock, in the poetry of Kipling, never far from the front pages in a constitutional crisis.
I love the sufiana style of writing in Tagore’s poetry.
A verbal art like poetry is reflective; it stops to think. Music is immediate, it goes on to become.
I write poetry anyway and have for years and years. For me, putting fiction and poetry together is like the best of both worlds.
If a line of poetry strays into my memory, my skin bristles so that the razor ceases to act.
Today the U.S. is farther from being nourished by poetry than it was a hundred years ago, when books of poems were best-sellers.
I admire ‘Adventure Time’ for being a piece of art in the way that I think art should be. If you want to see it is poetry, you can, and if you don’t, you can watch a fun cartoon.
It is very difficult to explain poetry. You have to understand the poetry and figure out your own take and your relatability.
When you begin to write poems because you love language, because you love poetry. Something happens that makes you write poems. And the writing of poems is incredibly pleasurable and addictive.
And at some point I would like to talk my publisher into doing an anthology of my poetry alongside some teen readers’ poetry. It would be fun, and really wonderful to get their stuff out there.
Who writes poetry imbibes honey from the poisoned lips of life.
If we ask a vague question, such as, ‘What is poetry?’ we expect a vague answer, such as, ‘Poetry is the music of words,’ or ‘Poetry is the linguistic correction of disorder.’
What she did was to open our eyes to details of country life such as teaching us names of wild flowers and getting us to draw and paint and learn poetry.
When I was younger, I was so crazy about poetry that I didn’t notice who was noticing. It seemed to me so tremendous and large.
I didn’t want to deal in poetry. I got rid of that after a few months.
In poetry, everything can be faked but the intensity of utterance.
When I taught at the University of Houston in the Creative Writing program, we required the poets to take workshops in fiction writing, and we required the fiction writers to take workshops in poetry.
The other side of it is that, despite all that, people reach out to poetry at the key moments in their lives.
The length and shape of the poemetto, like the greater Romantic lyric of English poetry, lends itself to retrospection and commentary.
Fogs are like dreams that feed the soul, and without their mysterious embrace, childhood, courtship, poetry and the composition of music become all the more difficult.
For poetry there exists neither large countries nor small. Its domain is in the heart of all men.
Poetry has done enough when it charms, but prose must also convince.
Hence poetry is something more philosophic and of graver import than history, since its statements are rather of the nature of universals, whereas those of history are singulars.
I published, privately, a collection of my serious poetry I had written over the years. I only published 50 copies, which I gave to friends, in a special deluxe edition. It was ridiculously expensive but I’m glad that I did it.
