poetry
Quotations
Quotations on the topic of ‘poetry’ from all listed authors (click on the ‘click to view listing’ links to view each quote in full).
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“He fertilizes a phrase or a line of poetry for weeks and then gives birth to it in a speech.” -John Colville
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“I write poetry in order to live more fully.” -Judith Rodriguez
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“Poetry is a matter of life, not just a matter of language.” -Lucille Clifton
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“Women who are inclined to write poetry at all are inspired by being mad at something.” -Amy Clampitt
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“Poetry is an art, and chief of the fine art the easiest to dabble in, the hardest in which to reach true excellence.” -Edmund Clarence Stedman
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“Poetry is an art, the easiest to dabble in, but the hardest to reach true excellence.” -J. G. Stedman
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“For a poet to depict a poet in poetry is a hazardous experiment in regarding one’s own trade a sense of humour and a little wholesome cynicism are not amiss.” -Edward Dowden
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“That’s the way it is with poetry: When it is incomprehensible it seems profound, and when you understand it, it is only ridiculous.” -Galway Kinnell
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“Who writes poetry imbibes honey from the poisoned lips of life.” -William Rose Benet
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“Music has a poetry of its own, and that poetry is called melody.” -Joshua Logan
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“Poetry is like making a joke. If you get one word wrong at the end of a joke, you’ve lost the whole thing.” -W. S. Merwin
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“I could no more define poetry than a terrier can define a rat.” -Alfred Edward Housman
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“I wrote The Green Eye of the Little Yellow God in five hours, but I had it all planned out. It isn’t poetry and it does not pretend to be, but it does what it sets out to do.” -J. Milton Hayes
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“I’m looking for a guy who makes you want to dance and write poetry all day long.” -Angela Sarafyan
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“Some say they see poetry in my paintings I see only science.” -Georges Seurat
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“I didn’t want to deal in poetry. I got rid of that after a few months.” -Tom Wesselmann
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“For me, poetry is always a search for order.” -Elizabeth Jennings
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“All good poetry is forged slowly and patiently, link by link, with sweat and blood and tears.” -Alfred Douglas
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“I don’t know a better preparation for life than a love of poetry and a good digestion.” -Zona Gale
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“For there is a sound reasoning upon all flowers. For flowers are peculiarly the poetry of Christ.” -Christopher Smart
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“Poetry asks people to have values, form opinions, care about some other part of experience besides making money and being successful on the job.” -Toi Derricotte
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“Poetry uses the hub of a torque converter for a jello mold.” -Diane Glancy
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“There’s not a good poet I know who has not at the beck and call of his memory a vast quantity of poetry that composes his mental library.” -Anthony Hecht
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“I don’t look on poetry as closed works. I feel they’re going on all the time in my head and I occasionally snip off a length.” -John Ashbery
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“What is poetry which does not save nations or people?” -Czeslaw Milosz
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“Theater and poetry were what helped people stay alive and want to go on living.” -Vanessa Redgrave
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“I started off in England and very few people knew I was Australian. I mean, the clues were in the poems, but they didn’t read them very carefully, and so for years and years I was considered completely part of the English poetry scene.” -Peter Porter
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“Poetry is of so subtle a spirit, that in the pouring out of one language into another it will evaporate.” -John Denham
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“Don’t call my lyrics poetry. It’s an insult to real poets.” -Bernie Taupin
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“You don’t go after poetry, you take what comes. Maybe the gods do it through me but I certainly do a hell of a lot of the work.” -Phyllis Gotlieb
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“This career essentially chased me down while I was on the spoken-word scene in New York. I kept hearing that my delivery of my poetry – which was very personal and cathartic at the time- was very moving to folks. People thought that I was an actress because of my delivery, when I was just…
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“As I got older, I really got into Tupac’s poetry, his books and just learning about his life and what he was into.” -Jhene Aiko
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“Let me read you some of my poetry. My poetry just takes me to another level.” -Rick Fox
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“Great poetry is always written by somebody straining to go beyond what he can do.” -Stephen Spender
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“The mystic purchases a moment of exhilaration with a lifetime of confusion and the confusion is infectious and destructive. It is confusing and destructive to try and explain anything in terms of anything else, poetry in terms of psychology.” -Basil Bunting
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“What does that represent? There was never any question in plastic art, in poetry, in music, of representing anything. It is a matter of making something beautiful, moving, or dramatic – this is by no means the same thing.” -Fernand Leger
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“Poetry must be made by all and not by one.” -Comte de Lautreamont
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“So much of my poetry begins with something that I can describe in visual terms, so thinking about distance, thinking about how life begins and what might be watching us.” -Tracy K. Smith
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“Poetry criticism at its worst today is mean in spirit and spiteful in intent, as if determined to inflict the wound that will spur the artist to new heights if it does not cripple him or her.” -David Lehman
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“The older I’ve got the less I find myself going back and re-reading or really reading new fiction or poetry.” -Reynolds Price
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“To feel most beautifully alive means to be reading something beautiful, ready always to apprehend in the flow of language the sudden flash of poetry.” -John Andrew Holmes
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“The urge to write poetry is like having an itch. When the itch becomes annoying enough, you scratch it.” -Robert Penn Warren
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“I use rock and jazz and blues rhythms because I love that music. I hope my poetry has a relationship with good-time rock’n roll.” -Adrian Mitchell
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“I wish you would read a little poetry sometimes. Your ignorance cramps my conversation.” -Anthony Hope
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“I used to joke that if acting didn’t work out, poetry was my commonsense fallback.” -Merritt Wever
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“Literature is a state of culture, poetry is a state of grace, before and after culture.” -Juan Ramon Jimenez
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“Poetry’s always dead, you know? You don’t realize how good poetry is until 15 years later.” -Richard Hell
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“The first question at that time in poetry was simply the question of honesty, of sincerity.” -George Oppen
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“Freedom is poetry, taking liberties with words, breaking the rules of normal speech, violating common sense. Freedom is violence.” -Norman O. Brown
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“Reality only reveals itself when it is illuminated by a ray of poetry.” -Georges Braque
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“Well, I write a lot of poetry – that’s where it usually all starts. I definitely want to show you guys sides of me – love, loss, heartbreak – all of that good stuff!” -Tristan Wilds
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“Too many people in the modern world view poetry as a luxury, not a necessity like petrol. But to me it’s the oil of life.” -John Betjeman
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“For poetry there exists neither large countries nor small. Its domain is in the heart of all men.” -Giorgos Seferis
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“My father had wanted to name me for Dylan Thomas. He had seen him speak on one of those drunken poetry tours he did.” -Dylan Walsh
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“I found that it wasn’t so oddball to like music and poetry and visual arts, they’re kindred spirits.” -J. Carter Brown
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“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.” -Marcus Mumford
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“All poetry has to do is to make a strong communication. All the poet has to do is listen. The poet is not an important fellow. There will also be another poet.” -Stevie Smith
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“Religion is no more possible without prayer than poetry without language, or music without atmosphere.” -James Martineau
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“Well, if this is poetry, I’m certainly never going to write any myself.” -James Schuyler
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“But poetry is a way of language, it is not its subject or its maker’s background or interests or hobbies or fixations. It is nearer to utterance than history.” -Thomas Lynch
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“Nobody ever told me what to read, or ever put poetry in my way.” -Isaac Rosenberg
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“Whereas with poetry no one has to show anybody really, and you don’t have to tell anyone you’re doing it.” -Roger McGough
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“What she did was to open our eyes to details of country life such as teaching us names of wild flowers and getting us to draw and paint and learn poetry.” -Laurie Lee
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“Poetry had far better imply things than preach them directly… in the open pulpit her voice grows hoarse and fails.” -F. L. Lucas
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“Prior to Wordsworth, humor was an essential part of poetry. I mean, they don’t call them Shakespeare comedies for nothing.” -William Collins
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“I think that the job of poetry, its political job, is to refresh the idea of justice, which is going dead in us all the time.” -Robert Hass
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“All I knew about Ethiopia was from a few records that I like, as well as what I read about the famine. But you get there and it’s another world. It’s filled with art and music and poetry and intellectuals and writers – all kinds of people.” -Flea
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“Some Marines made fun of the fact that I had done plays and studied poetry, but then I won the award for physical training.” -David Hunt
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“One of the things I’ve always liked about my husband is he’s very good at lots of stuff. He was an English teacher when I met him. He wrote poetry and played the guitar. As time went on, he decided to go into economics, so he’s very analytical and mathematical in addition to his artsy…
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“I see architecture not as Gropius did, as a moral venture, as truth, but as invention, in the same way that poetry or music or painting is invention.” -Michael Graves
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“Well, I like to write poetry. I’m a published poet.” -Misha Collins
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“There’s one of my new poems actually – is a good example of where my poetry has ended up. My earlier river poetry was more like a cross between Shelley and Dylan Thomas.” -Robert Adamson
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“I was kind of an outcast in school ’cause I always kept to myself and was writing poetry and then going on tour with my brother band all the time, so kids didn’t know what to make of me.” -Christina Perri
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“No art form points like poetry to this originality of language as to its essential and abiding concern.” -Thomas Harrison
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“Reading poetry gives me a sense of calm, well-being, and love for humanity – the same stuff more flexible women get from yoga.” -J. Courtney Sullivan
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“Publishing the lyric books, poetry or comics of other musicians I know. That’s the thing I really want to break into!” -Frank Iero
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“Short fiction is the medium I love the most, because it requires that I bring everything I’ve learned about poetry – the concision, the ability to say something as vividly as possible – but also the ability to create a narrative that, though lacking a novel’s length, satisfies the reader.” -Ron Rash
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“Let my life as Poet begin. I want the life of the Poet. I have labored for over twelve years, one thousand pages of prose. Now, I want the easiness of poetry. The brevity of the poem.” -Maxine Hong Kingston
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“All the modern verse plays, they’re terrible they’re mostly about the poetry. It’s more important that the play is first.” -Denis Johnson
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“Since the printing press came into being, poetry has ceased to be the delight of the whole community of man it has become the amusement and delight of the few.” -John Masefield
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“Poetry is innocent, not wise. It does not learn from experience, because each poetic experience is unique.” -Karl Shapiro
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“Poetry proceeds from the totality of man, sense, imagination, intellect, love, desire, instinct, blood and spirit together.” -Jacques Maritain
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“And inasmuch as the bridge is a symbol of all such poetry as I am interested in writing it is my present fancy that a year from now I’ll be more contented working in an office than ever before.” -Hart Crane
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“Poetry brings all possible experience to the same degree: a degree in the consciousness beyond which the consciousness itself cannot go.” -Laura Riding
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“Society’s dark hull drifts further and further away. It is this place – the place of our separation, our distinction – that much of his poetry occupies.” -Tomas Transtromer
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“Poetry says the things that I can’t say. I read a lot, but I never write it.” -Trevor McDonald
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“Conversation may be compared to a lyre with seven chords – philosophy, art, poetry, love, scandal, and the weather.” -Anna Jameson
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“Poetry is one of the few nasty childhood habits I’ve managed to grow out of.” -Tom Holt
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“Lapped in poetry, wrapped in the picturesque, armed with logical sentences and inalienable words.” -Anatole Broyard
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“Poetry is a totally different art than film.” -Stan Brakhage
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“Music is more emotional than prose, more revolutionary than poetry. I’m not saying I’ve got the answers, just a of questions that I don’t hear other artists asking.” -Malcolm Wilson
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“That poetry survived in its formal agencies finally, and that prose survived to get something said.” -Robert Creeley
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“I do actually dabble in a bit of poetry! And I’m yet to pen a script, but it is something that I’ve been telling myself I want to do.” -Luke Treadaway
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“I have epiphanies all the time, because I’m always thinking. I’m a thinker. I’m always writing poetry, I’m always coming to conclusions.” -Chrisette Michele
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“The higher Greek poetry did not make up fictitious plots its business was to express the heroic saga, the myths.” -Gilbert Murray
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“Poetry is man’s rebellion against being what he is.” -James Branch Cabell
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“We are looking to brands for poetry and for spirituality, because we’re not getting those things from our communities or from each other.” -Naomi Klein
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“If you were going to choose a way of making your way in this world and a place to start from, you might not choose poetry and you might not choose Huddersfield.” -Simon Armitage
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“The poetry of heroism appeals irresistibly to those who don’t go to a war, and even more to those whom the war is making enormously wealthy. It’s always so.” -Louis-Ferdinand Celine
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“And how can poetry stand up against its new conditions? Its position is perfectly precarious.” -John C. Ransom
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“It is a happy thing that there is no royal road to poetry. The world should know by this time that one cannot reach Parnassus except by flying thither.” -Gerard Manley Hopkins
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“I think that one possible definition of our modern culture is that it is one in which nine-tenths of our intellectuals can’t read any poetry.” -Randall Jarrell
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“Probably induced by the asthma, I started reading and writing early on, my literary efforts from the age of about nine running chiefly to poetry and plays.” -Patrick White
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“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.” -Ian Hamilton Finlay
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“Poetry comes alive to me through recitation.” -Natalie Merchant
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“I’m not an academic, but I’ve always loved poetry since I’ve been small.” -Naveen Andrews
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“Poetry is a succession of questions which the poet constantly poses.” -Vicente Aleixandre
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“We don’t attempt to have any theme for a number of the anthology, or to have any particular sequence. We just put in things that we like, and then we try to alternate the prose and the poetry.” -James Laughlin
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“Poetry is the impish attempt to paint the color of the wind.” -Maxwell Bodenheim
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“Poetry does not consist of words alone there must be sentiment and fancy, combination and arrangement.” -Samuel Prout
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“I’d always loved poetry and I’d always loved writing music and composing music, but I hadn’t thought of putting the two together until around that time.” -Bruce Cockburn
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“In rap music, even though the element of poetry is very strong, so is the element of the drum, the implication of the dance. Without the beat, its commercial value would certainly be more tenuous.” -Archie Shepp
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“The trouble with us in America isn’t that the poetry of life has turned to prose, but that it has turned to advertising copy.” -Louis Kronenberger
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“It all has to do with art – writing, painting, things I’ve done for a long time but just never had enough time to pursue. I have poetry – things that are designed for songs, but they’re always poems first.” -Jason Newsted
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“The poetry and transgression that was so much of surrealism’s anarchic force has been recruited into mainstream culture. It has been made commonplace by television and magazine merchandising, by computer games and Internet visuals, by film and MTV, by the fashion shoot.” -Graham Joyce
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“I’ve got a book of poetry by the bed, one of these big collections that goes back to the Greeks and Romans.” -Martin C. Smith
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“The sources of poetry are in the spirit seeking completeness.” -Muriel Rukeyser
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“I want a fever, in poetry: a fever, and tranquillity.” -James Dickey
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“Poetry is its own medium it’s very different than writing prose. Poetry can talk in an imagistic sense, it has particular ways of catching an environment.” -Story Musgrave
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“It was actually a women’s writing group I belonged to in graduate school that gave me the courage to move from poetry to fiction.” -Mary Gordon
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“When I hit a block, regardless of what I am writing, what the subject matter is, or what’s going on in the plot, I go back and I read Pablo Neruda’s poetry. I don’t actually speak Spanish, so I read it translation. But I always go back to Neruda. I don’t know why, but it…
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“To be born in Wales, not with a silver spoon in your mouth, but, with music in your blood and with poetry in your soul, is a privilege indeed.” -Brian Harris
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“I always liked the magic of poetry but now I’m just starting to see behind the curtain of even the best poets, how they’ve used, tried and tested craft to create the illusion. Wonderful feeling of exhilaration to finally be there.” -David Knopfler
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“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.” -Louise Jameson
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“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.” -Rene Auberjonois
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“One can’t write for all readers. A poet cannot write for people who don’t like poetry.” -Nathalie Sarraute
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“No, what I should really like to do right now, in the full blaze of lights, before this illustrious assembly, is to shower every one of you with gifts, with flowers, with offerings of poetry – to be young once more, to ride on the crest of the wave.” -Knut Hamsun
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“We recognise in the finished art, which is the result of these conditions, the best words in the best order – poetry and to put this essential poetry into different classes is impossible.” -John Drinkwater
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“The whole thing about making films in an organic film on location is that it’s not all about characters, relationships and themes, it’s also about place and the poetry of place. It’s about the spirit of what you find, the accidents of what you stumble across.” -Mike Leigh
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“On a summer night it can be lovely to sit around outside with friends after dinner and, yes, read poetry to each other. Keats and Yeats will never let you down, but it’s differently exciting to read the work of poets who are still walking around out there.” -Michael Cunningham
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“Theater is far superior to film in poetry, in abstract poetry.” -Julie Taymor
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“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.” -Gordon Getty
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“Because people are very interested in my poetry, in what I say.” -Compay Segundo
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“Poetry can’t cure cancer, but it can save your life until you die.” -Maurice Saatchi
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“Poetry is the mother-tongue of the human race.” -Johann Georg Hamann
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“There are men who can write poetry, and there are men who can read balance sheets. The men who can read balance sheets cannot write.” -Henry R. Luce
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“What we know is that Shakespeare wrote perhaps the most remarkable body of passionate love poetry in the English language to a young man.” -Stephen Greenblatt
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“My mother carried on and supported us her ambition had been to write poetry and songs.” -Philip Levine
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“We simply have not kept in touch with poetry.” -Paul Muldoon
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“I don’t live for poetry. I live far more than anybody else does.” -Charles Olson
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“Besides the actual reading in class of many poems, I would suggest you do two things: first, while teaching everything you can and keeping free of it, teach that poetry is a mode of discourse that differs from logical exposition.” -A. R. Ammons
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“My art and poetry is very political now. Because you’ve got to find that truth within you and express yourself. Somewhere out there, I know, there will be people who will listen.” -Jack Bowman
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“In my opinion, the most significant works of the twentieth century are those that rise beyond the conceptual tyranny of genre they are, at the same time, poetry, criticism, narrative, drama, etc.” -Juan Goytisolo
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“I thought we were gonna open up the world of poetry and music to all kinds of things, and yet, I can’t really think of anyone who’s done anything like it since.” -Ray Manzarek
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“I was always interested in French poetry sort of as a sideline to my own work, I was translating contemporary French poets. That kind of spilled out into translation as a way to earn money, pay for food and put bread on the table.” -Paul Auster
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“In politics, as in poetry, it is sometimes true that it is darkest before dawn.” -Lawrence Summers
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“I have been enlightened. I have fallen into poetry and it has swallowed me up.” -Keith Haring
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“Music is my thing. It’s my thing it’s what I love. It’s what I do. It’s football to me it’s Christmas to me religion to me poetry to me.” -Ryan Adams
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“Poets should ignore most criticism and get on with making poetry.” -Anne Stevenson
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“Conventional wisdom notwithstanding, there is no reason either in football or in poetry why the two should not meet in a man’s life if he has the weight and cares about the words.” -Archibald MacLeish
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“Children seem naturally drawn to poetry – it’s some combination of the rhyme, rhythm, and the words themselves.” -Jack Prelutsky
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“That is what I did with Jack, and that’s why he liked to do the readings with me because he knew I was there for him, and for our ability to blend the poetry and the music.” -David Amram
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“There is a wonderful Hungarian literature, especially in lyric poetry.” -Gyorgy Ligeti
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“There is no gilding of setting sun or glamor of poetry to light up the ferocious and endless toil of the farmers’ wives.” -Hamlin Garland
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“Poetry is at least an elegance and at most a revelation.” -Robert Fitzgerald
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“If a line of poetry strays into my memory, my skin bristles so that the razor ceases to act.” -A. E. Housman
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“I do not see how a man can work on the frontiers of physics and write poetry at the same time. They are in opposition.” -Paul Dirac
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“I was influenced by surrealist poetry and painting as were thousands of other people, and it seems to me to have become a part of the way I write, but it’s not.” -Kenneth Koch
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“You watch an old ‘Jeopardy!’ and the categories alone are very plain. ‘Poetry,’ or ‘Movies,’ or ‘Physics.’ If you watch it now, though, there’ll be a theme board where the categories are all Hitchcock movies. Lots more jokes, lots more high-concept categories and questions.” -Ken Jennings
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“I believe that the short story is as different a form from the novel as poetry is, and the best stories seem to me to be perhaps closer in spirit to poetry than to novels.” -Tobias Wolff
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“Poetry teaches us music, metaphor, condensation and specificity.” -Walter Mosley
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“But it is the province of religion, of philosophy, of pure poetry only, to go beyond life, beyond time, into eternity.” -Alfred de Vigny
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“I want to write a book of poetry, as well as children’s stories.” -Bobby McFerrin
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“So now I have a collection of poetry by Aaron Neville and I give it to people I want to share it with. I’d like to publish it someday.” -Aaron Neville
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“I have always written poetry but I have never applied it to songwriting.” -Janine Turner
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“I see no reason for calling my work poetry except that there is no other category in which to put it.” -Marianne Moore
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“My next project is to get back to that. Actually, to learn how to write poetry. I’m not kidding.” -Harry Mathews
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“Then I discovered I loved writing poetry more than fiction.” -George Murray
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“Writing poetry makes you intensely conscious of how words sound, both aloud and inside the head of the reader. You learn the weight of words and how they sound to the ear.” -Helen Dunmore
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“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.” -Justin Townes Earle
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“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.” -Shelby Foote
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“Most people can’t tell now who wrote what. I like that blurring of identities within the band. because it becomes a unified thing that can’t be related to other forms of historical poetry.” -Thurston Moore
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“Writing poetry is the hard manual labor of the imagination.” -Ishmael Reed
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“Poetry, especially traditional Iranian poetry, is very good at looking at things from a number of different angles simultaneously.” -Asghar Farhadi
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“A great many people seem to think writing poetry is worthwhile, even though it pays next to nothing and is not as widely read as it should be.” -Mark Strand
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“I think that great poetry is the most interesting and complex use of the poet’s language at that point in history, and so it’s even more exciting when you read a poet like Yeats, almost 100 years old now, and you think that perhaps no one can really top that.” -Diane Wakoski
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“I published, privately, a collection of my serious poetry I had written over the years. I only published 50 copies, which I gave to friends, in a special deluxe edition. It was ridiculously expensive but I’m glad that I did it.” -Tom Glazer
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