Even when poetry has a meaning, as it usually has, it may be inadvisable to draw it out... Perfect understanding will sometimes almost extinguish pleasure.
Translated poetry filled the no-man's-land between my own work and other writers', and I found this fascinating to explore.
All one's inventions are true, you can be sure of that. Poetry is as exact a science as geometry.
I've never read a political poem that's accomplished anything. Poetry makes things happen, but rarely what the poet wants.
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 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.
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.
One problem we face comes from the lack of any agreed sense of how we should be working to train ourselves to write poetry.
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.
When you are writing literary writing, you are communicating something subtextual with emotions and poetry. The prose has to have a voice; it's not just typing. It takes a while to get that voice.
Frankly, writing poetry for children is plain old fun, and I consider myself blessed to have such a delightful career.
Every now and then I read a poem that does touch something in me, but I never turn to poetry for solace or pleasure in the way that I throw myself into prose.
The greatest thing a human soul ever does in this world... to see clearly is poetry, prophecy and religion all in one.
I must say, when I reread myself, it's the poetry I tend to look at. It's the most exciting to write, and it's over the quickest.
A theology should be like poetry, which takes us to the end of what words and thoughts can do.
I was excited by what my painter friends were doing, and they seemed to be interested in our poetry too, and that was a wonderful little, fizzy sort of world.
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.
Poetry is the work of poets, not of peoples or communities; artistic creation can never be anything but the production of an individual mind.
Against barbarity, poetry can resist only by confirming its attachment to human fragility like a blade of grass growing on a wall while armies march by.
I see no reason for calling my work poetry except that there is no other category in which to put it.
I certainly can't speak for all cultures or all societies, but it's clear that in America, poetry serves a very marginal purpose. It's not part of the cultural mainstream.
