Poetry Is Quotes - Page 11

• I've got mixed feelings about poetry cause done well poetry is fantastic. But not many people are capable of doing it well. I think you should have some kind of license to perform poetry. A poetic license perhaps.

  Craig Ferguson

  Thinking, Should Have, Poetic License

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• Poetry is a life-cherishing force.

  Mary Oliver

  Cherish, Force

  Mary Oliver (1994). “A Poetry Handbook”, p.122, Houghton Mifflin Harcourt

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• If we’re going to solve the problems of the world, we have to learn how to talk to one another. Poetry is the language at its essence. It’s the bones and the skeleton of the language. It teaches you, if nothing else, how to choose your words.

  Rita Dove

  Skeletons, Essence, World

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• Poetry is perhaps this: an Atemwende, a turning of our breath. Who knows, perhaps poetry goes its way—the way of art—for the sake of just such a turn? And since the strange, the abyss and Medusa’s head, the abyss and the automaton, all seem to lie in the same direction—is it perhaps this turn, this Atemwende, which can sort out the strange from the strange? It is perhaps here, in this one brief moment, that Medusa’s head shrivels and the automaton runs down? Perhaps, along with the I, estranged and freed here, in this manner, some other thing is also set free?

  Paul Celan

  Running, Art, Lying

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• Poetry [is] more necessary than ever as a fire to light our tongues.

  Naomi Shihab Nye

  Fire, Light, Tongue

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• So far as I am concerned, poetry and every other art was and is and forever will be strictly and distinctly a question of individuality... If poetry is your goal, you've got to forget all about punishments and all about rewards and all about self-styled obligations and duties and responsibilities etcetera ad infinitum and remember one thing only: that it's you - nobody else - who determine your destiny and decide your fate. Nobody else can be alive for you; nor can you be alive for anybody else... There's the artist's responsibility; and the most awful responsibility on earth.

  e. e. cummings

  Wisdom, Art, Responsibility

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• Poetry is the ultimate democracy.

  Brendan Kennelly

  Democracy, Ultimate

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• Writing poetry is what I am. I wouldn’t know what else to be.

  Alice Notley

  Writing, Writing Poetry, Knows

  "A Quick Interview With Alice Notley". Interview with Corey Zeller, ampersandreview.com. May 11, 2014.

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• Poetry is one of the few nasty childhood habits I've managed to grow out of

  Tom Holt

  Funny, Childhood, Nasty

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• Charles Bernstein's pairs of jingles of 'public discourse' are 'simultaneous double narrative / the space between's the other narrative/as if they're opposite.' In the space between, outside representation but in the 'presence' of it, we are provoked to laugh. Bernstein alters our language to open a double range that's public and mind at once and inseparable, that is 'Poetry is patterned thought in search of unpatterned mind.' Girly Man is doing it.

  Leslie Scalapino

  Girly, Men, Opposites

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• I began writing for kids because I wanted to effect a change in American society. I continue in that spirit. By the time we reach adulthood, we are closed and set in our attitudes. The chances of a poet reaching us are very slim. But I can open a child's imagination, develop his appetite for poetry, and more importantly, show him that poetry is a natural part of everyday life. We all need someone to point out that the emperor is wearing no clothes. That's the poet's job.

  Arnold Adoff

  Jobs, Attitude, Children

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• Poetry is much more important than the truth, and, if you don't believe that, try using the two methods to get laid.

  Mark Forsyth

  Believe, Two, Important

  Mark Forsyth (2011). “The Etymologicon: A Circular Stroll through the Hidden Connections of the English Language”, p.203, Icon Books Ltd

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• Poetry is the thread that leads us out of the labyrinth of despair and into the light.

  Gregory Orr

  Light, Labyrinth, Despair

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• Poetry is for me Eucharistic. You take someone else's suffering into your body, their passion comes into your body, and in doing that you commune, you take communion, you make a community with others.

  Mary Karr

  Inspirational, Sympathy, Book

  "Religion & Ethics NewsWeekly" with Judy Valente, www.pbs.org. March 4, 2011.

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• I am composed of contradictions, which is why poetry is a better form for me than philosophy

  Czeslaw Milosz

  Philosophy, Contradiction, Form

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• We all need ways to express ourselves, and poetry is one of mine.

  Jack Prelutsky

  Needs, Way, Mines

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• Let my name perish, -- the poetry is good poetry and the music is good music,
  and beauty dieth not, and the heart that needs it will find it.

  Sidney Lanier

  Heart, Names, Needs

  Sidney Lanier (1999). “Poems of Sidney Lanier”, p.23, University of Georgia Press

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• Poetry is the only hopeEven if you do not believe it, you have to do it.

  Andrei Voznesensky

  Believe, Ifs

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• I exaggerate. I oversimplify. I generalize. But there’s no cynicism here. American poetry is a mess. Long live American poetry.

  David Biespiel

  Long, Cynicism, Mess

  "David Biespiel’s Poetry Wire: The Cynicism Of Mark Edmundson, Or Poetry Is Still Not Dead" by David Biespiel, therumpus.net. June 21, 2013.

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• In mauve sea-orchids as in her striking earlier book Guardians of the Secret, Lila Zemborain brings into relationship the viscera of the body and the spill of the universe in tense compositions that blur distinctions between lyric and prose poetry, between science and eros.

  Forrest Gander

  Book, Prose Poetry, Sea

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• Poetry is a presentiment of the truth.

  Anna Kamienska

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• Poetry is a response to the daily necessity of getting the world right.

  Wallace Stevens

  World, Response

  Wallace Stevens (2011). “Selected Poems”, p.13, Knopf

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• In the total darkness, poetry is still there, and it is there for you.

  Abbas Kiarostami

  Darkness, Stills

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• Beauty makes one lose one's head. Poetry is born of this decapitation

  Jean Cocteau

  Born, Loses

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• Because, in fact, women, feminists, do read my poetry, and they read it often with the power of their political interpretation. I don't care; that's what poetry is supposed to do.

  Diane Wakoski

  Power, Feminist, Political

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