If I read a book and it makes my whole body so cold no fire can ever warm me, I know that is poetry.
I was trained as an actress. But I wasn't a very convincing actress, so I started doing punk poetry and then fell into doing stand-up.
Poetry should surprise by a fine excess and not by singularity, it should strike the reader as a wording of his own highest thoughts, and appear almost a remembrance.
Children seem naturally drawn to poetry - it's some combination of the rhyme, rhythm, and the words themselves.
From what the moderns want, we must learn what poetry should become; from what the ancients did, what poetry must be.
Nothing truly convincing - which would possess thoroughness, vigor, and skill - has been written against the ancients as yet; especially not against their poetry.
The poet may be used as a barometer, but let us not forget that he is also part of the weather.
The job of the poet is to render the world - to see it and report it without loss, without perversion. No poet ever talks about feelings. Only sentimental people do.
I've got a book of poetry by the bed, one of these big collections that goes back to the Greeks and Romans.
They need to learn poetry. They don't need to learn about poetry. They don't need to be told how to interpret poetry. They don't need to be told how to understand poetry. They need to learn it.
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.
I grew up in this town, my poetry was born between the hill and the river, it took its voice from the rain, and like the timber, it steeped itself in the forests.
Few rappers realize the genre sprang from West African griots through Delta slave songs to jazz poetry and the comedic trash talk of 'the dozens.'
Sometimes poetry, it is incomprehensible. But we need incomprehensible stuff! It is very healthy to talk about incomprehensible things! It is very healthy! We need it!
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.
Write verse, not poetry. The public wants verse. If you have a talent for poetry, then don't by any means mother it, but try your hand at verse.
The completely solitary self: that's where poetry comes from, and it gets isolated by crisis, and those crises are often very intimate also.
The experimental poetry thing is not my thing. It's a programme of the avant-garde: basically a refusal of the kind of poetry I write.
Nowadays, what an award gives is a sense of solidarity with the poetry guild, as it were: sustenance coming from the assent of your peers on the judging panel.
Manifesting that order of poetry where we can at last grow up to that which we stored up as we grew.
Poetry, I feel, is a tyrannical discipline. You've got to go so far so fast in such a small space; you've got to burn away all the peripherals.
