Writing a book of poetry is like dropping a rose petal down the Grand Canyon and waiting for the echo.
My father had wanted to name me for Dylan Thomas. He had seen him speak on one of those drunken poetry tours he did.
None but a poet can write a tragedy. For tragedy is nothing less than pain transmuted into exaltation by the alchemy of poetry.
I think what will happen is that fiction will become more like poetry. As in, the only people who read it will write it.
There is no gilding of setting sun or glamor of poetry to light up the ferocious and endless toil of the farmers' wives.
My next project is to get back to that. Actually, to learn how to write poetry. I'm not kidding.
It may be said that poems are in one way like icebergs: only about a third of their bulk appears above the surface of the page.
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.
And how can poetry stand up against its new conditions? Its position is perfectly precarious.
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.
For whatever reason, people, including very well-educated people or people otherwise interested in reading, do not read poetry.
Probably all the attention to poetry results in some value, though the attention is more often directed to lesser than to greater values.
Poetry leads us to the unstructured sources of our beings, to the unknown, and returns us to our rational, structured selves refreshed.
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!
The poetry that sustains me is when I feel that, for a minute, the clouds have parted and I've seen ecstasy or something.
Whereas with poetry no one has to show anybody really, and you don't have to tell anyone you're doing it.
You can be intuitive when you've got a more expansive role. You can get into the poetry of telling the story rather than just pushing buttons.
The lines of poetry, the period of prose, and even the texts of Scripture most frequently recollected and quoted, are those which are felt to be preeminently musical.
The first duty of a human being is to assume the right functional relationship to society - more briefly, to find your real job, and do it.
I really always expected to somebody to make me happy and I don't think you can really enter into a relationship until you are happy.
