Works of art imitate and provoke other works of art, the process is the source of art itself.
Poetry takes courage because you have to face things and you try to articulate how you feel.
Daydreaming is one of the key sources of poetry – a poem often starts as a daydream that finds its way into language – and walking seems to bring a different sort of alertness, an associative kind of thinking, a drifting state of mind.
There are still many tribal cultures where poetry and song, there is just one word for them. There are other cultures with literacy where poetry and song are distinguished. But poetry always remembers that it has its origins in music.
The commitment to working at poetry is important because a poet is a maker, and a poem is a made thing. We have to honor our feelings by working to transform them into something meaningful and lasting.
Someone who’s awake in the middle of the night is a soul consciousness when everyone else is asleep, and that creates a feeling of solitude in poetry that I very much like.
You’re shadowed by your own dream, especially as you get older, of trying to create something that will last in poetry. And so, you’re working on its behalf.
There have always been great defenses of poetry, and I’ve tried to write mine, and I think all of my work and criticism is a defense of poetry to try and keep something alive in poetry.
When I taught at the University of Houston in the Creative Writing program, we required the poets to take workshops in fiction writing, and we required the fiction writers to take workshops in poetry.
I don’t think you can read poetry while you’re watching television very well.
There’s never been a culture without poetry in the history of the world.
In every culture, in every language, there is expressive play, expressive word play; there’s language use to different purposes that we would call poetry.
I had feelings that I didn’t know what to do with, and I felt better when I started writing them. I thought of it as poetry. I did notice girls really liked it. Better than football. They liked the combination.
I’d say people do need some help with poetry because I think poetry just helps takes us to places that Americans aren’t always accustomed to going.
I find great consolation in having a lot of poetry books around. I believe that writing poetry and reading it are deeply intertwined. I’ve always delighted in the company of the poets I’ve read.
As long as there’s been poetry, there have been lamentations.
Poetry is a form of necessary speech… I have sought to restore the aura of sacred practice that accompanies true poetic creation, to honor both the rational and the irrational elements of poetry.
Poetry is meant to inspire readers and listeners, to connect them more deeply to themselves even as it links them more fully to others. But many people feel put off by the terms of poetry, its odd vocabulary, its notorious difficulty.
The line is a way of framing poetry. All verse is measured by lines. The poetic line immediately announces its difference from everyday speech and prose.
The sense of flowing, which is so crucial to song, is also crucial to poetry.
When poetry separates from song, then the words have to carry all the rhythm themselves; they have to do all the work. They can’t rely on the singing voice.
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 started writing poetry as a teenager in suburban Chicago out of emotional desperation.
I grew up in a middle-class house without books, without art. No one around me wrote poetry or even read it.
Poetry itself hasn’t been well served by poets who fled to the margins.
I aspire to a poetry of great formal integrity, deep passion and high intellect, and I have many models for how to do that.
I didn’t read poetry seriously until college, when I really began to devour it in a very intense way. I also discovered that a poet is a maker. Before that, I thought a poet was someone who wrote about his own experiences.
Poetry is a vocation. It is not a career but a calling.
Writing poetry is such an intense experience that it helps to start the process in a casual or wayward frame of mind.
Poetry takes place in time. It is a durational. Things take place in sequence.