The iambic pentameter owes its pre-eminence in English poetry to its genius for variation. Good blank verse does not sound like a series of identically measured lines. It sounds like a series of subtle variations on the same theme.
Among the American contemporaries I read with most enjoyment are several North Carolinians. I think the best poetry being written these days is being written by Southerners.
Superstition is the poetry of life.
Poetry is the exquisite expression of exquisite expressions.
From reading a previous answer, you know that I consider all those aspects to be part of American cultural myth and thus they figure into good American poetry, whether the poet is aware of what he is doing or not.
Society’s dark hull drifts further and further away. It is this place – the place of our separation, our distinction – that much of his poetry occupies.
Poetry is a domestic art, most itself when most at home.
I went through a phase of reading lots of Urdu poetry, thanks to the great transliterated versions that have become available.
I’m so happy to be an advocate for poetry.
I’m not a rock star writing poetry. I don’t feel like a rock star and I don’t know what one is, actually. I’m a goalie/poet or a hotel guest/poet or a father/poet.
Poetry privileges music and is aesthetically more challenging. Prose privileges information and is emotionally more challenging.
Dylan Thomas is now as much a case history as a chapter in the history of poetry.
To translate poetry, one has to possess some art, at the very least the art of stylistic re-embodiment.
I’m not really one for fancy, big words and poetry, and the scriptwriters worked very hard on ‘Paradise Lost’ to translate it.
As I got older, I really got into Tupac’s poetry, his books and just learning about his life and what he was into.
But I am not political in the current events sense, and I have never wanted anyone to read my poetry that way.
I come here to speak poetry. It will always be in the grass. It will also be necessary to bend down to hear it. It will always be too simple to be discussed in assemblies.
Written poetry is worth reading once, and then should be destroyed. Let the dead poets make way for others.
Before people complain of the obscurity of modern poetry, they should first examine their consciences and ask themselves with how many people and on how many occasions they have genuinely and profoundly shared some experience with another.
The office of poetry is not to make us think accurately, but feel truly.
Writing poetry, which for me was then saying how I felt about this and that, didn’t help me to understand the world I lived in.
I love poetry; it’s my primary literary interest, and I suppose the kind of reading you do when you are reading poems – close reading – can carry over into how you read other things.
Freedom is poetry, taking liberties with words, breaking the rules of normal speech, violating common sense. Freedom is violence.
Poets should ignore most criticism and get on with making poetry.
The cliche is dead poetry.
