Poetry is a political act because it involves telling the truth.
If my poetry aims to achieve anything, it's to deliver people from the limited ways in which they see and feel.
Poetry is a mixture of common sense, which not all have, with an uncommon sense, which very few have.
I think when kids just see well-crafted poetry, it's just obtuse to them. It's hard to relate to.
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.
When truth has no burning, then it is philosophy, when it gets burning from the heart, it becomes poetry.
I used to write stories and poetry, but for some reason I have it in my head that if I'm going to write, I have to write a script.
And at least in poetry you should feel free to lie. That is, not to lie, but to imagine what you want, to follow the direction of the poem.
The poetry of a people comes from the deep recesses of the unconscious, the irrational and the collective body of our ancestral memories.
Do-gooders are easily overlooked. We're supposed to be soft, touchy-feely types, who wear Birkenstocks, compost everything, and write poetry by candlelight.
I've been most happy to be an advocate for the kinds of grassroots things that people are doing who care about poetry.
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.
I wanted to write poetry almost a little more than I wanted to eat.
There is an urgent need for Americans to look deeply into themselves and their actions, and musical poetry is perhaps the most effective mirror available. Every newspaper headline is a potential song.
Anticipating that most poetry will be worse than carrying heavy luggage through O'Hare Airport, the public, to its loss, reads very little of it.
The poetry of Walt Whitman. I can return again and again to these magnificent poems and still get pleasure from reading them.
Pound's translation of Chinese poetry was maybe the most important thing I read. Eliot a little bit later.
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.
The older I've got the less I find myself going back and re-reading or really reading new fiction or poetry.
The urge to write poetry is like having an itch. When the itch becomes annoying enough, you scratch it.
In the United States, in poetry workshops, it's now quite a thing to make graduate students learn poems by heart.
