Poetry Is Quotes - Page 12

• Distinctly American poetry is usually written in the context of one's geographic landscape, sometimes out of one's cultural myths, and often with reference to gender and race or ethnic origins.

  Diane Wakoski

  Race, Landscape, Sometimes

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• But I don't think that poetry is a good, to use a contemporary word, venue, for current events.

  Diane Wakoski

  Thinking, Events, Use

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• High and low culture come together in all Post Modern art, and American poetry is not excluded from this.

  Diane Wakoski

  Art, Together, Culture

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• Poetry is the memory of language

  Jacques Roubaud

  Memories, Language

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• I think we fool ourselves and really negate a great deal of history if we think that the oral history of poetry is shorter than the written history of poetry. It's not true. Poetry has a longer oral tradition than it does written

  Saul Williams

  Thinking, Doe, Oral Tradition

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• All poetry is experimental poetry.

  Wallace Stevens

  Poetry

  1957 Opus Posthumous, Aphorisms,'Adagia'.

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• All poetry is supposed to be instructive but in an unnoticeable manner; it is supposed to make us aware of what it would be valuable to instruct ourselves in; we must deduce the lesson on
  our own, just as with life.

  Johann Wolfgang von Goethe

  Would Be, Lessons, Valuable

  Letter to Carl Friedrich Zelter, November 26, 1825.

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• Poetry is the dark side of the moon.

  Charles Wright

  Dark, Moon, Sides

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• Black Poetry is not for Black People...it is for everybody

  Nikki Giovanni

  People, Black, Black People

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• I will never cease advising my friends and enemies to read poetry before anything.

  Arnold Bennett

  Enemy, Friends And Enemies, My Friends

  Arnold Bennett (2013). “How to Live on Twenty-Four Hours a Day: The Secret Edition - Open Your Heart to the Real Power and Magic of Living Faith and Let the Heaven Be in You, Go Deep Inside Yourself and Back, Feel the Crazy and Divine Love and Live for Your Dreams”, p.49, Lulu Press, Inc

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• The writing of poetry is a chancy business, it's currency solitude and loss, its tools coffee and too much wine, its hours midnight, dawn, and dusk, and unlike other trade the hours asleep are not time off.

  Keith Miller

  Coffee, Writing, Wine

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• In Australia, not reading poetry is the national pastime.

  Phyllis McGinley

  Reading, Australia Day, Pastime

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• I am not concerned with Poetry. My subject is War, and the pity of War. The Poetry is in the pity. Yet these elegies are to this generation in no sense conciliatory. They may be to the next. All a poet can do today is warn. That is why the true Poets must be truthful.

  Wilfred Owen

  War, This Generation, Generations

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• Poems have a different music from ordinary language, and every poem has a different kind of music of necessity, and that's, in a way, the hardest thing about writing poetry is waiting for that music, and sometimes you never know if it's going to come.

  C. K. Williams

  Writing, Waiting, Ordinary

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• The gap between verse and poetry is enormous. Between good poetry and good prose the gap is much narrower

  Michael Longley

  Gaps, Enormous, Good Poetry

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• I think poetry is best read to oneself.

  Rickie Lee Jones

  Thinking, Oneself

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• What is a Professor of Poetry? How can poetry be professed?

  W. H. Auden

  Poetry, Professors

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• I feel that poetry is going on all the time inside, an underground stream.

  John Ashbery

  Healing, Streams, Feels

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• Poetry is like painting: one piece takes your fancy if you stand close to it, another if you keep at some distance.

  Horace

  Distance, Pieces, Fancy

  Horace (1928). “Horace on the Art of Poetry: Latin Text, English Prose Translation, Introduction and Notes, Together with Ben Jonson's English Verse Rendering”

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• Poetry is the art of understanding what it is to be alive.

  Archibald MacLeish

  Art, Understanding, Alive

  Recalled on his death, 20 Apr1982.

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• If the art of poetry is?the art of making sense of the chaos of human experience, it's not a bad thing to see a lot of chaos.

  Archibald MacLeish

  Art, Chaos, Human Experience

  On his work in government. Quoted in Scott Donaldson Archibald MacLeish (1992).

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• Poetry is an affair of sanity, of seeing things as they are, to recreate the familiar, eternalizing the poet's own perception in unique and original verbal form.

  Philip Larkin

  Unique, Sanity, Affair

  "Required Writing-Miscellaneous Pieces 1955-1982". Book by Philip Larkin, Farrar Strauss, 1984.

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• In its use of words poetry is just the reverse of science. Very definite thoughts do occur, but not because the words are so chosen as logically to bar out all possibilities save one.

  David Daiches

  Poetry, Bars, Use

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• Wit, like poetry, is insusceptible of being constructed upon rules founded merely in reason. Like faith, it exists independent of reason, and sometimes in hostility to it.

  Christian Nestell Bovee

  Independent, Sometimes, Reason

  Christian Nestell Bovee (1862). “Intuitions and Summaries of Thought”, p.206

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• Poetry is a river; many voices travel in it; poem after poem moves along in the exciting crests and falls of the river waves. None is timeless; each arrives in an historical context; almost everything, in the end, passes. But the desire to make a poem, and the world's willingness to receive it--indeed the world's need of it--these never pass.

  Mary Oliver

  Moving, Fall, Voice

  Mary Oliver (1994). “A Poetry Handbook”, p.9, Houghton Mifflin Harcourt

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