The poet doesn't invent. He listens.
A true poet does not bother to be poetical. Nor does a nursery gardener scent his roses.
Poetry is indispensable - if I only knew what for.
I have nothing to say, I am saying it, and that is poetry.
There is poetry as soon as we realize that we possess nothing.
You don't have to suffer to be a poet; adolescence is enough suffering for anyone.
It's something we, guys, have all done. Made tapes for girls, trying to impress them, to meet them on a shared plane of aesthetics. Read them someone else's poetry because they do poetry better than you could do it, because you're too awkward to do i...
She was the Judy Garland of American poetry.
I think Ginsberg has done more harm to the craft that I honor and live by than anybody else by reducing it to a kind of mean that enables the most dubious practitioners to claim they are poets because they think, If the kind of thing Ginsberg does is...
I want a fever, in poetry: a fever, and tranquillity.
I like the way words go together and I like the gamesmanship of writing poetry. It is such a challenge.
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.
Poetry is of so subtle a spirit, that in the pouring out of one language into another it will evaporate.
I am two fools, I know, for loving, and for saying so in whining poetry.
A lyric, it is true, is the expression of personal emotion, but then so is all poetry, and to suppose that there are several kinds of poetry, differing from each other in essence, is to be deceived by wholly artificial divisions which have no real be...
For while the subjects of poetry are few and recurrent, the moods of man are infinitely various and unstable. It is the same in all arts.
If it is an imperfect word, no external circumstance can heighten its value as poetry.
It should here be added that poetry habitually takes the form of verse.
To know anything of a poet but his poetry is, so far as the poetry is concerned, to know something that may be entertaining, even delightful, but is certainly inessential.
Dancing is the poetry of the foot.
Like most lit nerds, I'm a voracious reader. I never got enough poetry under my belt growing up but I do read it - some of my favorites, Gina Franco and Angela Shaw and Cornelius Eady and Kevin Young, remind me daily that unless the words sing and da...
