I always wrote poetry as a teenager and it was always so dark, but it made me feel good to get it out.
When you’re doing poetry like mine that rhymes, it’s very easy to sound like a song that didn’t work out!
That’s a wonderful change that’s taken place, and so most poetry today is published, if not directly by the person, certainly by the enterprise of the poet himself, working with his friends.
If the poetry world celebrate its female stars at the true level of their productivity and influence, poetry would wind up being a largely female world, and the men would leave.
Poetry, it is often said and loudly so, is life’s true mirror. But a monkey looking into a work of literature looks in vain for Socrates.
My mum is a singer and harpist, and my dad writes fantastic poetry, so we’ve grown up around a lot of words and music.
My artistic manifesto exists in the world as poetry. So even though most of the things that I’ve done have been on other people’s projects or could be pigeonholed in certain ways, that’s not how I perceive myself.
In poetry, you must love the words, the ideas and the images and rhythms with all your capacity to love anything at all.
I guess I find the boundaries between poetry and prose to be somewhat permeable.
I think I felt at some point that I couldn’t understand poetry or that it was beyond me or it didn’t speak to my experience. I think that was because I hadn’t yet found the right poems to invite me in.
Poetry can’t give us the laws and institutions and representatives, the antidotes we need: only public activism by massive numbers of citizens can do that.
For awhile after you quit Keats all other poetry seems to be only whistling or humming.
A public expectation, it has to be said, not of poetry as such but of political positions variously approvable by mutually disapproving groups.
I don’t write poetry and then strum some chords and then fit the words on top of the chords.
I’ve been reading poetry publicly for 20 years, and this is what you do – you express, you sometimes dig a bit to get a conversation started. That’s the point of poetry. You’re supposed to go, ‘Hmmmm,’ and ‘Woooh!’
I have published in ‘The New Yorker,’ ‘Holiday,’ ‘Life,’ ‘Mademoiselle,’ ‘American Heritage,’ ‘Horizon,’ ‘The Ladies Home Journal,’ ‘The Kenyon Review,’ ‘The Sewanee Review,’ ‘Poetry,’ ‘Botteghe Oscure,’ the ‘Atlantic Monthly,’ ‘Harper’s.’
The lines of poetry, the period of prose, and even the texts of Scripture most frequently recollected and quoted, are those which are felt to be preeminently musical.
Poetry is what Milton saw when he went blind.
I love poetry – just to read it and be around it.
Humour is a fine line to walk in poetry, as in fiction. I just think it’s harder to write. It’s harder to keep the respect of the reader too.
A novel is a work of poetry. In order to write it, one must have tranquility of spirit and of impression.
When I first began writing, it was not in screenwriting but in poetry. That form was so evocative, all about the image and the emotion captured in a Polaroid-like smattering of words.
I accept all interpretations of my films. The only reality is before the camera. Each film I make is kind of a return to poetry for me, or at least an attempt to create a poem.
And my father was a comic. He could play any musical instrument. He loved to perform. He was a wonderfully comedic character. He had the ability to dance and sing and charm and analyze poetry.
But I don’t think that poetry is a good, to use a contemporary word, venue, for current events.
