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.
In writing, I want to be remembered for telling good stories in beautiful and powerful language, using the poetry of words to reflect the thematic concerns of compelling stories.
Our most famous writers are Faulkner and Eudora Welty and Flannery O'Connor. It would make sense that the poetry would reflect some of those same values, some of the same techniques.
The idea that myth is the opposite of knowledge, or the opposite of truth, is simply to disallow it. It is like saying poetry is the opposite of truth.
Poetry, it is often said and loudly so, is life's true mirror. But a monkey looking into a work of literature looks in vain for Socrates.
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.
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.
The fact of the matter is that the most unexpected and miraculous thing in my life was the arrival in it of poetry itself - as a vocation and an elevation almost.
I was always making up rhymes. But I never thought that poetry would become my life.
That sense of a life in natural objects, which in most poetry is but a rhetorical artifice, was, then, in Wordsworth the assertion of what was for him almost literal fact.
Kerouac: You're ruining American poetry, O'Hara. O'Hara: That's more than you ever did for it, Kerouac
One should always be drunk. That's all that matters...But with what? With wine, with poetry, or with virtue, as you chose. But get drunk.
The world is full of poetry. ~ The air is living with its spirit; and the waves dance to the music of its melodies, and sparkle in its brightness.
Aimlessly It pounds the shore. White and aimless signals. No One listens to poetry. — from "Thing Language
Nobody: It is strange that you do not remember any of your poetry, William Blake.
David Mills: [Banging a book in frustration] Fuckin' Dante... poetry-writing faggot! Piece of shit, motherfucker!
Thinking in its lower grades, is comparable to paper money, and in its higher forms it is a kind of poetry.
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.
Often people, when they're confronted with a poem, it's like someone who keep saying 'what is the meaning of this? What is the meaning of this?' And that dulls us to the other pleasures poetry offers.
America's liberal arts universities have long been safe zones for leftist thinking, protected ivory towers for the pseudo-elite who earn their livings writing papers nobody reads about gender roles in the poetry of Maya Angelou.
France is not poetic; she even feels, in fact, a congenital horror of poetry. Among the writers who use verse, those whom she will always prefer are the most prosaic.
