Poetry isn’t a profession, it’s a way of life. It’s an empty basket; you put your life into it and make something out of that.
Research such as ours is driven by the human imperative to understand where we are. It motivates the study of our positions in family, or in society, or on earth. The results may be termed geology, or sociology, or poetry.
Deals are my art form. Other people paint beautifully on canvas or write wonderful poetry. I like making deals, preferably big deals. That’s how I get my kicks.
Poetry. I read Walt Whitman, Emily Dickinson, and Jane Hirschfield. I like to read Billy Collins out loud.
If poetry and the arts do anything, they can fortify your inner life, your inwardness.
I think it was T.S. Eliot who talked about good poetry being felt before it’s understood. I believe that. There are some bands where I love their lyrics but I don’t have a clue what they’re on about.
Poetry and prayer are very similar.
All religion, my friend, is simply evolved out of fraud, fear, greed, imagination, and poetry.
We’re all just animals. That’s all we are, and everything else is just an elaborate justification of our instincts. That’s where music comes from. And romantic poetry. And bad novels.
Pure mathematics is, in its way, the poetry of logical ideas.
Auden said poetry makes nothing happen. But I wonder if the opposite could be true. It could make something happen.
Poetry comes alive to me through recitation.
Solitude gives birth to the original in us, to beauty unfamiliar and perilous – to poetry. But also, it gives birth to the opposite: to the perverse, the illicit, the absurd.
I’m a storyteller: the crux of the matter is to reach beauty, poetry; it doesn’t matter if that is comedy or tragedy. They’re the same if you reach the beauty.
A documentary film-maker can’t help but use poetry to tell the story. I bring truth to my fiction. These things go hand in hand.
Children can write poetry and then, unless they’re poets, they stop when reach puberty.
Personality is everything in art and poetry.
Poetry is not a matter of feelings, it is a matter of language. It is language which creates feelings.
In the poetry of immigrants, nostalgia is as common as confetti at parades or platitudes at political conventions.
My favorite subject probably was math. I love math. Figures just intrigue me. I was really good at math. English probably was my worst subject. But I used to write a lot of poetry. I used to write poetry all the time.
Poetry, being supremely useless, by its very existence represents a protest against the so-called ‘real world’ of busy-ness and moneymaking, so we must embrace, salute and support our poets.
The fate of poetry is to fall in love with the world.
Only in dreams, in poetry, in play do we sometimes arrive at what we were before we were this thing that, who knows, we are.
Spoken word poetry is the art of performance poetry. I tell people it involves creating poetry that doesn’t just want to sit on paper, that something about it demands it be heard out loud or witnessed in person.
Epic poetry exhibits life in some great symbolic attitude. It cannot strictly be said to symbolize life itself, but always some manner of life.
