Poetry Is Quotes - Page 21

• Poetry, in the past, was the center of our society, but with modernity it has retreated to the outskirts. I think the exile of poetry is also the exile of the best of humankind.

  Octavio Paz

  Past, Thinking, Our Society

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• I would not recommend poetry as a career. In the first place, it's impossible in this time and place - in this culture - to make poetry a career. The writing of poetry is one thing. It's an obsession, the scratching of a divine itch, and has nothing to do with money. You can, however, make a career out of being a poet by teaching, traveling around, and giving lectures. It's a thin living at best.

  Maxine Kumin

  Teaching, Writing, Careers

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• Poetry is a hazardous occupation, very hazardous. There may be bad things in there inside you that maybe you can't handle.

  James Dickey

  Occupation, May, Handle

  James Dickey, Ronald Baughman (1989). “The voiced connections of James Dickey: interviews and conversations”, Univ of South Carolina Pr

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• Most poetry is the utterance of a man in some state of passion, love, joy, grief, rage, etc., and no doubt this is as it should be. But no man is perpetually in a passion and those states in which he is amused and amusing, detached and irreverent, if less important, are no less amusing. If there were no poets who, like Byron, express these states, Poetry would lack something.

  W. H. Auden

  Grief, Passion, Men

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• Poetry is engendered in solitude, so what better meter for it than the clip of a buckskin horse?

  Edward Hoagland

  Horse, Solitude, Meter

  Edward Hoagland (1992). “Balancing acts: essays”

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• Poetry is probably the one field of writing in which it is a mistake to try to psych out editors. In fact, specific marketing advice can sometimes harm the novice poet by enticing him to pursue fashions. The poet's best hope is to sound like nobody else, The finest, most enduring poetry constructs a marketplace of its own.

  X. J. Kennedy

  Fashion, Mistake, Writing

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• I am not sure, once a poet has found out what has been written already, and how it was written - once, in short, he has learnt his trade - that he should bother with literature at all. Poetry is not like surgery, a technique that can be copied. Every operation the poet performs is unique, and need never be done again.

  Philip Larkin

  Unique, Technique, Needs

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• One good way to start writing poetry is to read all kinds of poetry: not just in order to imitate but to fill up your head with it, to absorb it, to make poetry an essential part of how you view the world.

  Valerie Worth

  Writing, Views, Order

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• Poetry is a projection across silence of cadences arranged to break that silence with definite intentions of echoes, syllables, wave lengths.

  Carl Sandburg

  Echoes, Silence, Cadence

  Carl Sandburg (2003). “The Complete Poems of Carl Sandburg”, p.317, Houghton Mifflin Harcourt

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• Poetry is an art practiced with the terribly plastic material of human language.

  Carl Sandburg

  Art, Language, Plastic

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• Zen is poetry; poetry is Zen.

  Reginald Horace Blyth

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• Poetry is when you make new things familiar and familiar things new

  Rory Sutherland

  Writing, Photographer, Great Photography

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• To experience poetry is to see over and above reality. It is to discover that which is beyond the physical, to experience another life and another level of feeling. It is to wonder about the world, to understand the nature of people and, most importantly, to be shared with another, old or young, known or unknown.

  Ai Weiwei

  Reality, People, Feelings

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• Before you came
  the world was prose.
  Now poetry is born.

  Nizar Qabbani

  World, Born, Prose

  Nizar Qabbani, “Two African Breasts”

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• To write poetry is to be very alone, but you always have the company of your influences. But you also have the company of the form itself, which has a kind of consciousness. I mean, the sonnet will simply tell you, that's too many syllables or that's too many lines or that's the wrong place. So, instead of being alone, you're in dialogue with the form.

  Billy Collins

  Writing, Mean, Lines

  "Poet Billy Collins discusses humor, authenticity and ‘Aimless Love’". Interview with Jeffrey Brown, www.pbs.org. October 29, 2013.

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• Poetry is one of the original arts, and it began, as did all the fine arts, within the original wilderness of the earth.

  Mary Oliver

  Art, Wilderness, Fine

  Mary Oliver (1994). “A Poetry Handbook”, p.106, Houghton Mifflin Harcourt

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• Music is good, not evil. Poetry is good, not evil. Primitive, but oh, so true!

  Dmitri Shostakovich

  Evil, Music Is, Primitive

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• The secret wish of poetry is to stop time.

  Charles Simic

  Secret, Wish, Stop Time

  Charles Simic (2015). “The Life of Images: Selected Prose”, p.21, Harper Collins

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• Poetry isn't written from the idea down. It's written from
  the phrase, line and stanza up, which is different from
  what your teacher taught you to do in school.

  Margaret Atwood

  Teacher, School, Ideas

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• Poetry is ... the physical enactment of a process
  of knowing by means of language.

  Mark Doty

  Mean, Knowing, Language

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• To me Art (poetry) is a continuous and continuing process and that when a man fails to write good poetry he fails to live fully or well.

  Charles Bukowski

  Art, Writing, Men

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• When I am writing fiction, I believe I am much better organized, more methodical - one has to be when writing a novel. Writing poetry is a state of free float.

  Margaret Atwood

  Believe, Writing, Fiction

  Margaret Atwood (2006). “Waltzing Again: New and Selected Conversations with Margaret Atwood”

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• It is fatal to decide, intellectually, what good poetry is because you are then in honour bound to try to write it, instead of the poems that only you can write.

  Philip Larkin

  Writing, Trying, Good Poetry

  Philip Larkin (2012). “Required Writing: Miscellaneous Pieces 1955-1982”, p.72, Faber & Faber

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• The commonest error made in relation to poetry is that it consists simply in verse-making. Many confound the casket of meter and rhyme with the jewel of thought which it encloses, and, perhaps, in some instances, after close investigation, they have found the casket empty and turned away with feelings of disappointment and disgust.

  Orson F. Whitney

  Disappointment, Errors, Jewels

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• For every poet it is always morning in the world; history a forgotten, insomniac night. The fate of poetry is to fall in love with the world in spite of history.

  Derek Walcott

  Morning, Falling In Love, Fate

  Derek Walcott (2014). “What the Twilight Says: Essays”, p.79, Macmillan

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