Poetry Quotes

One of the most powerful devices of poetry is the use of distortions. You can go from talking about the way a minute passes to the way a century passes, or a lifetime.

If a poem is not memorable, there's probably something wrong. One of the problems of free verse is that much of the free verse poetry is not memorable.

I learned to impersonate the kind of person that talks about poetry. It comes from teaching, I think.

That poetry survived in its formal agencies finally, and that prose survived to get something said.

I knew what book we had to write, it was clear in my head; it was journals and poetry. So I passed on their offer. I told my agent this is our vision, and no one's done it this way.

At this point we've answered about every question you could possibly imagine about Deep Space Nine, so we do this thing called Theatrical Jazz, where we do a show of bits and pieces of things from plays and literature, poetry... stuff that we like. It's fun.

All the modern verse plays, they're terrible; they're mostly about the poetry. It's more important that the play is first.

I don't like poetry that just slaps violent words on a canvas, as it were.

I'm not really quiet or shy. Ask any of my friends! But I always ground my poetry in life itself. Poetry is an art of language, though, so I am always aware of every word's meaning, or multiple meanings.

We read Robert Browning's poetry. Here we needed no guidance from the professor: the poems themselves were enough.

I've got a book of poetry by the bed, one of these big collections that goes back to the Greeks and Romans.

Poetry is but another form of inquiry into the nature of phenomena, using with its own unique procedures and tools.

My obsession with time informs my poetry so completely it is hard for me to summarize it. We want time to pass, for new things to happen to us, we want to hold on to certain moments, we don't want our lives to end.

I've often entertained paranoid suspicions about my fridge and what it's been doing to my poetry when I'm not looking, but I never even considered that my fan was thinking about me.

Then I discovered I loved writing poetry more than fiction.

Pound's translation of Chinese poetry was maybe the most important thing I read. Eliot a little bit later.

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.

Teaching writing over the years intrudes on your own writing in important ways, taking away some of the excitement of poetry.

Some people swear by writing courses, but whether it really helps American poetry, I have doubts.

Alchemy is the art of far and near, and I think poetry is alchemy in that way. It's delightful to distort size, to see something that's tiny as though it were vast.