Poetry and fiction have grieved for a century now over the loss of some vitality which they think they see in a past from which we are by now irrevocably alienated.
I wrote poetry, which got me into lyrics. Stevie Wonder, Carole King, Elton John pulled me into pop. I started singing with a band - just for fun - when I was 17. And pretty soon, I was thinking I could sing pop in English as well as Spanish.
Poetry is a mere drug, Sir.
Poetry is as precise a thing as geometry.
Everything one invents is true, you may be perfectly sure of that. Poetry is as precise as geometry.
I was in Paris at an English-language bookstore. I picked up a volume of Dickinson's poetry. I came back to my hotel, read 2,000 of her poems and immediately began composing in my head. I wrote down the melodies even before I got to a piano.
As human beings, we are the only organisms that create for the sheer stupid pleasure of doing so. Whether it's laying out a garden, composing a new tune on the piano, writing a bit of poetry, manipulating a digital photo, redecorating a room, or inve...
If you don't mark your successes, the day your ship comes in could be just another day at the office, and there's no poetry in that.
The poetry and transgression that was so much of surrealism's anarchic force has been recruited into mainstream culture. It has been made commonplace by television and magazine merchandising, by computer games and Internet visuals, by film and MTV, b...
That's the way it is with poetry: When it is incomprehensible it seems profound, and when you understand it, it is only ridiculous.
There's a level at which, if you take poetry seriously, the focus it involves... that never goes away.
There is a wonderful Hungarian literature, especially in lyric poetry.
I've often entertained paranoid suspicions about my fridge and what it's been doing to my poetry when I'm not looking, but I never even considered that my fan was thinking about me.
The poetry community here has been extraordinarily welcoming.
Then I discovered I loved writing poetry more than fiction.
Clarity, clarity, surely clarity is the most beautiful thing in the world, A limited, limiting clarity I have not and never did have any motive of poetry But to achieve clarity.
Writing poetry, which for me was then saying how I felt about this and that, didn't help me to understand the world I lived in.
I developed a definition - which I think becomes less and less accurate as poetry moves into the world - that poetry was a way of speaking to the world, but fiction was a way to get the world to speak to me.
My wife has been my greatest earthly inspiration. She excels in eloquence, the poetry of words, empathy and graciousness.
I think what will happen is that fiction will become more like poetry. As in, the only people who read it will write it.
Poetry consists in a rhyming dictionary and things seen.
