Poetry Is Quotes - Page 19

• The good, supreme, divine poetry is above the rules and reason. Whoever discerns its beauty with a firm, sedate gaze does not see it, any more than he sees the splendor of a lightning flash. It does not persuade our judgement, it ravishes and overwhelms it.

  Michel de Montaigne

  Judgement, Lightning, Doe

  Michel de Montaigne (1958). “Complete Essays”, p.171, Stanford University Press

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• Beauty is startling. She wears a gold shawl in the summer and sells seven kinds of honey at the flea market. She is young and old at once, my daughter and my grandmother. In school she excelled in mathematics and poetry. . . Beauty will dance with anyone who is brave enough to ask her.

  J. Ruth Gendler

  Summer, Daughter, School

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• Poetry is supposed to be musical. But people don't understand prose. They're so used to reading journalism - clunky, functional sentences that convey factual information - facts, more than just the surfaces of things.

  Jonathan Lethem

  Reading, People, Musical

  Source: www.believermag.com

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• Bad poetry is caused by people who sit down and think, Now I am going to write a Poem.

  Charles Bukowski

  Writing, Thinking, People

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• Poetry is like a puzzle-solving strategy for me. I like to poem my way through tricky questions and ideas. That's about the only consistent thread through my poem-creation process.

  Sarah Kay

  Ideas, Way, Strategy

  Source: journalwomenwriters.wordpress.com

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• Comic strips introduced me to metaphors. They are pure metaphor, so you learn how to tell a story with symbols, which is a very valuable thing to learn. And I learned that from motion pictures, too, and from poetry. Poetry is mainly metaphor. If it doesn't have a metaphor, it doesn't work.

  Ray Bradbury

  Stories, Metaphor, Comic

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• Poets are political, they have to be reflections of their times [because] they're living in their times... Poetry is political in that it's standing in opposition to fascism. Good poetry asks a bunch of questions and asks the audience to interact with themselves or see themselves in it; maybe you like it or you don't like it. But the fascist sort of stuff plays on your fears and tells you to jump on the party line and gives some simple excuses - blame this person.

  John Cusack

  Party, Reflection, Simple

  "The Raven - John Cusack interview". Interview with Rob Carnevale, www.indielondon.co.uk.

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• Poetry is the most informative of all of the arts because everything comes down to poetry. No matter what it is we are describing, ultimately we use either a metaphor; or we say "that's poetry in motion." You drink a glass of wine and say, "that's poetry in a bottle." Everything is poetry, so I think we come down to emotional information. And that's what poetry conveys.

  Nikki Giovanni

  Art, Wine, Emotional

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• Poetry is like air. It's one of the necessary things. Everyone benefits from poetry. And as you know, poetry is international. There are only two things that are truly international, poetry and wine.

  Nikki Giovanni

  Wine, Air, Two

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• What I search for continuously in my art is adequate language, language I hope can stand beyond any particular occasion. What I'm finding is that in our increasingly dysfunctional U.S. society, marvelous poetry is being written - out of and amid the dysfunction.

  Adrienne Rich

  Art, Dysfunction, Adequate

  Source: criticalflame.org

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• My songs were influenced not so much by poetry on the page but by poetry being recited by the poets who recited poems with jazz bands.

  Bob Dylan

  Song, Pages, Band

  Bob Dylan “The fiddler now upspoke: a collection of Bob Dylan's interviews, press conferences and the like from throughout the masters career”

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• I don't know if you actually get something out of writing poetry. I think poetry is an autonomous muse that decides to come and sit on your couch.

  Alice Walker

  Writing, Thinking, Muse

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• Poetry is music though, unfortunately, not all music is poetry. Because music has other carriers to take its message - beats, lyrics, singers, bass players - anyone in music can rise to make a major statement but in poetry there are only words to do the work. And they do sometimes have to sweat.

  Nikki Giovanni

  Player, Sweat, Bass

  Source: artvoice.com

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• I love poetry, be it in music or be it in Andrei Tarkovsky, Francesca Woodman or anyone else, I just love poetry.

  Graciela Iturbide

  Love Poetry

  Interview with Munem Wasif, www.chobimela.org. November 24, 2014.

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• On the one hand poetry is useless. It can't change the world materially. On the other hand it is a basic part of human existence. It came into the world when humans did. It's what makes human beings human.

  Bei Dao

  Hands, Useless, World

  Source: quod.lib.umich.edu

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• Poetry is a really helpful instrument. It's so physical; the musicality becomes a sort of expression of the body. The mind is there too, in the formal aspects of the poem. The emotions are there in the way the senses gather things into the poem.

  Alison Hawthorne Deming

  Expression, Mind, Body

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• Poetry is one of the most full ways of discovering what it feels like to be a human being in this particular moment, in this particular set of concerns. It's all about discovery.

  Alison Hawthorne Deming

  Discovery, Way, Moments

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• Bringing science into poetry is one way of acknowledging some of the richest stuff that is in my cultural moment.

  Alison Hawthorne Deming

  Stuff, Way, Moments

  Nashville Review Interview, as.vanderbilt.edu. December 1, 2012.

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• We're nature. Our minds are nature. Our desire to make poetry is nature.

  Alison Hawthorne Deming

  Mind, Desire

  Nashville Review Interview, as.vanderbilt.edu. December 1, 2012.

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• Poetry is often very critical of the culture from which it emerges. Quite often literary critics of a nationalist bent talk up the national culture, in a way that the literary texts don't. Poetry can bring out areas of denial and repression.

  Edna Longley

  Culture, Denial, Way

  "The SRB Interview: Edna and Michael Longley". SRB interview, www.scottishreviewofbooks.org. October 19, 2009.

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• Poetry isn't an efficient tool for preserving experience, any more than it's an efficient mode of communication, but who says that it should be efficient?

  James Arthur

  Communication, Tools, Should

  "Poetry As a Way of Thinking: An Interview with James Arthur". Interview with Emilia Phillips, www.32poems.com.

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• For me, poetry is a way of thinking, and like many poets, I'm driven by the idea of trying to find the impossible, perfect words: the words that will hold my subject.

  James Arthur

  Thinking, Ideas, Perfect

  "Poetry As a Way of Thinking: An Interview with James Arthur". Interview with Emilia Phillips, www.32poems.com.

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• All poetry is political, to some degree.

  Mike Young

  Political, Degrees

  Source: 12thstreetonline.wordpress.com

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• Poetry is a way of always paying attention to the world for me; a way of letting the world stick to me instead of being anxious or estranged, just being present in the world.

  Mike Young

  Attention, World, Way

  Source: pamplemoussevt.org

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• My father's death when I was eighteen and his struggles as a Jewish immigrant provided me with the raw material, but for a long time I went from painting to fiction and then finally to poetry before I could find the right way of telling this story.

  Philip Schultz

  Father, Struggle, Long

  Source: poems.com

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