Poetry Quotes

The fact that something is in a rhymed form or in blank verse will not make it good poetry.

The idea of avant-garde art is a very suspicious thing to me, the idea that poetry is new and it keeps being new the way Chevrolets every year are new.

In the world of poetry there are would-be poets, workshop poets, promising poets, lovesick poets, university poets, and a few real poets.

Bleak House is just the most astounding piece of work. There's huge, visionary poetry in it.

I'm hopefully touring with Colin Baker next year in Perfect Strangers. I have performed with Sylvia Simms in poetry and music evenings. I would love to do those for the rest of my career - they are so fun and witty.

There is a wonderful Hungarian literature, especially in lyric poetry.

I write all the time - I write poetry, I love to write.

I don't think it's always good to read lots of poetry.

Poets should ignore most criticism and get on with making poetry.

When I was writing pretty poor poetry, this girl with midnight black hair told me to go on.

In the past, poetry came in the form of spells and chants used to effect change.

I've done a number of readings at poetry lounges in Vancouver and Los Angeles. I've compiled a book of poetry that's completed, and two others I'm working on.

I think that it's more likely that in my 60s and 70s I will be writing poetry rather than fiction.

You have to really dive deep back into yourself and get rid of so much modern analytical categorization. It's one of the great things poetry does.

The Language Poets are writing only about language itself. The Ashbery poets are writing only about poetry itself. That seems to me a kind of dead end.

Poetry, almost by definition, calls attention to its language and form.

I don't think poetry is something that can be taught. We can encourage young writers, but what you can't teach them is the very essence of poetry.

I don't think American poetry has gotten any better in the past 35 years. Oddly enough, creative writing programs seem to have been good for fiction, and I would not have predicted that.

A poem in form still has to have voice, gesture, a sense of discovery, a metaphoric connection, as any poetry does.

What actually makes poetry poetry is of course impossible to define. We recognize it when we hear it, when we see it, but we can't define it.