I’ve read a lot of war writing, even World War I writing, the British war poetry of Wilfred Owen and Siegfried Sassoon, Robert Graves’s memoir ‘Goodbye to All That,’ and a civilian memoir, ‘Testament of Youth,’ by Vera Brittain.
Cut quarrels out of literature, and you will have very little history or drama or fiction or epic poetry left.
The topics just kind of come to me. If they are relevant, it’s because they’re happening in the world around me, and it’s affecting me. Poetry is my way of dealing with it.
Drawing is a way of coming upon the connection between things, just like metaphor in poetry reconnects what has become separated.
Poetry is a street fighter. It has sharp elbows. It can look after itself. Poetry can’t be used for manipulation; it’s why you never see good poetry in advertising.
Gradually I find that my whole soul is merging itself into this business of writing, and especially of writing poetry. I am going to try it; and am going to test, in the most rigid way I know, the awful question whether it is my vocation.
I think there’s a certain poetry to having your body reflect what you feel inside of you. Perhaps you have a feeling that’s so pure, or overwhelming inside of you that your body disfigures to it – contortions match your confusion.
Poetry surrounds us everywhere, but putting it on paper is, alas, not so easy as looking at it.
I studied English at the College of Wooster in Ohio, and I did an M.F.A. in Poetry at Columbia.
Frankly, writing poetry for children is plain old fun, and I consider myself blessed to have such a delightful career.
Yes, I do write poetry. It’s very therapeutic. I’m influenced by Pablo Neruda and Gulzar Saab. It’s all very personal.
Poetry teaches us music, metaphor, condensation and specificity.
When I began, poetry was very academic. You published little pamphlets from fancy presses. It was rather… chaste. There wasn’t much public reading. Then there was poetry and jazz, which I don’t think worked, though I love jazz.
One of the things that distinguishes poetry from ordinary speech is that in a very few number of words, poetry captures some kind of deep feeling, and rhythm is the way to get there. Rhythm is the way the poetry carries itself.
I despair of ever writing excellent poetry.
Poetry is the art of substantiating shadows, and of lending existence to nothing.
I have always used a great variety of verse forms, especially in my poetry for children. I believe that poetry begins in childhood and that a poet who can remember his own childhood exactly can, and should, communicate to children.
So the best way to understand poetry, which is made by men, is to imitate, and that goes back to making work as a kind of doorway into new work, as opposed to making work as a mirror of the old work.
There are better ways we can transform this virulent hatred – by living our ideals, the Peace Corps, exchange students, teachers, exporting our music, poetry, blue jeans.
I was raised on songs of poetry like Simon and Garfunkel and Cat Stevens and Neil Young, etc. I love those old songs probably the most because they hit me so deep down in my core.
To me, poetry is spoken – not exclusively, but there’s a mix of languages in it. That’s what I liked about ‘For the Confederate Dead;’ it has many different tones to it.
The biggest problem is people are afraid of poetry, think they can’t understand it or that it will be boring.
Opera combines pretty basic theater and poetry, but the storyline itself is actually quite poetic and, after some digital research, taking that actual content and seeing it as undeniably poetic.
So few people read poetry. That’s sad, isn’t it?
The Bible is not just one book, but an entire library, with stories, songs, poetry, letters and history, as well as literature that might more obviously qualify as ‘religious.’
