I want people to bow as they see me and say he is gifted with poetry, he has seen the presence of the creator.
The only thing that can save the world is the reclaiming of the awareness of the world. That's what poetry does.
Poetry is the one place where people can speak their original human mind. It is the outlet for people to say in public what is known in private.
I was in Paris at an English-language bookstore. I picked up a volume of Dickinson's poetry. I came back to my hotel, read 2,000 of her poems and immediately began composing in my head. I wrote down the melodies even before I got to a piano.
There is no gilding of setting sun or glamor of poetry to light up the ferocious and endless toil of the farmers' wives.
I used to write sonnets and various things, and moved from there into writing prose, which, incidentally, is a lot more interesting than poetry, including the rhythms of prose.
I began the way nearly everybody I ever heard of - I began writing poetry. And I find that to be quite usual with writers, their trying their hand at poetry.
Everything one invents is true, you may be perfectly sure of that. Poetry is as precise as geometry.
Poetry is at least an elegance and at most a revelation.
Well, probably I was fed up with concrete poetry. There was a lot of bad concrete poetry and besides, it was confused with visual poetry which was completely different.
For me concrete poetry was a particular way of using language which came out of a particular feeling, and I don't have control over whether this feeling is in me or not.
But I can only write what the muse allows me to write. I cannot choose, I can only do what I am given, and I feel pleased when I feel close to concrete poetry - still.
But at the beginning it was clear to me that concrete poetry was peculiarly suited for using in public settings. This was my idea, but of course I never really much got the chance to do it.
Poetry is a mere drug, Sir.
Genuine poetry can communicate before it is understood.
Poetry is not a turning loose of emotion, but an escape from emotion; it is not the expression of personality, but an escape from personality. But, of course, only those who have personality and emotions know what it means to want to escape from these things.
I heard Nirvana, and discovered that songs could be like poetry, but a little bit more refined: you didn't have to have 20 verses to get your point across.
Poetry is of so subtle a spirit, that in the pouring out of one language into another it will evaporate.
I like the way words go together and I like the gamesmanship of writing poetry. It is such a challenge.
But one does not make living writing poetry unless you're a professor, and one frankly doesn't get a lot of girls as a poet.
The Bible should be taught, but emphatically not as reality. It is fiction, myth, poetry, anything but reality. As such it needs to be taught because it underlies so much of our literature and our culture.
The more poetry you have in the head, the more poetry you will understand because you will be getting to the roots of what it is that makes people write poetry at all.
Poetry was invented as an mnemonic device to enable people to remember their prayers.
Poetry should be able to reach everybody, and it should be able to appeal to all levels of understanding.
Poetry is composing for the breath.
My friends never talk to me about my poetry because they're embarrassed that I write it or they're embarrassed by what I write about which are not such extraordinarily terrifying things, but they are the state of human existence.
It is a way we reassess our past. We can do that in poetry in ways we can't do in prose.
I think poetry has lost an awful lot of its muscle because nobody knows any. Nobody has to memorize poetry.
I like poems that are little games.
Dealing with poetry is a daunting task, simply because the reason one does it as an editor at all is because one is constantly coming to terms with one's own understanding of how to understand the world.
