I grew up in this town, my poetry was born between the hill and the river, it took its voice from the rain, and like the timber, it steeped itself in the forests.
Naming a baby is an act of poetry, for many people the only creative moment of their lives.
Otherwise I don’t read much adult poetry at all, because I’m not smart enough and mostly I don’t get it.
What are the sources of poetry? Love and death and the paradox of love and death. All poetry from the beginning is about Eros and Thanatos. Those are the only subjects. And how Eros and Thanatos interweave.
The sort of poetry I seek resides in objects man can’t touch.
In traditional Asian arts, the word and the picture always sit next to each other. I have an aunt, a Chinese brush painter, who told me that when you do a Chinese brush painting, you have to pair the image up with some poetry.
In poetry everything which must be said is almost impossible to say well.
I’ve always written poetry and lyrics. My first husband, who was a musician, we wrote a bunch of songs together.
In the television age, the key distinction is between the candidate who can speak poetry and the one who can only speak prose.
However, poetry does not live solely in books or in school anthologies.
I was trained as an actress. But I wasn’t a very convincing actress, so I started doing punk poetry and then fell into doing stand-up.
Poetry is the communication through words of certain experiences that can be communicated in no other way.
A social consciousness should be reflected in your poetry.
Prior to Wordsworth, humor was an essential part of poetry. I mean, they don’t call them Shakespeare comedies for nothing.
It is a happy thing that there is no royal road to poetry. The world should know by this time that one cannot reach Parnassus except by flying thither.
Metaphorical tone deafness is when people are unable to discern what is of value in something. I think I’m tone deaf to poetry, for instance. Despite having studied it into a second year of university, most of it just leaves me cold.
I was playing a singer-songwriter, so I started writing, and I started going up to different places around Los Angeles and reading poetry of my own, which terrified me, but I had to do it. I picked up a guitar and started learning guitar.
Poetry taught me a great deal about language and images, but when it came to plotting, I was stumped. It’s been very much a learn-by-doing thing for me.
Poetry is fascinating. As soon as it begins the poetry has changed the thing into something extra, and somehow prose can go over into poetry.
In the winter of 1940, ‘The Atlantic Monthly’ invited Peter Viereck, a twenty-three-year-old Harvard graduate who had won the college’s top essay and poetry prizes, to write about ‘the meaning of young liberalism for the present age.’
I don’t think you get to good writing unless you expose yourself and your feelings. Deep songs don’t come from the surface; they come from the deep down. The poetry and the songs that you are suppose to write, I believe are in your heart.
I credit poetry for making this space-walk possible.
So much of my poetry begins with something that I can describe in visual terms, so thinking about distance, thinking about how life begins and what might be watching us.
I had a million jobs before I managed to make a living out of poetry.
Poetry is something to make us wiser and better, by continually revealing those types of beauty and truth, which God has set in all men’s souls.
