Poetry Is Quotes - Page 23

• The language of poetry is not stuck in place. Nothing can own language. I think, however, the genre of poetry itself is very feminine and motherly.

  Kim Hyesoon

  Thinking, Language, Motherly

  Source: www.guernicamag.com

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• Poetry is the disease of the brain.

  Alfred de Vigny

  Brain, Disease

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• The figure a poem makes. It begins in delight and ends in wisdom.

  Robert Frost

  Love Is, Desire, Delight

  "The Figure a Poem Makes". Essay by Robert Frost, 1939.

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• Poetry is a natural energy resource of our country.

  Richard Eberhart

  Country, Energy, Natural

  Richard Eberhart (1979). “Of Poetry and Poets”, Urbana : University of Illinois Press

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• The purpose of poetry is to restore to mankind the possibility to wonder.

  Octavio Paz

  Purpose, Wonder, Possibility

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• The medium of poetry is not words, the medium of poetry is not lines-it is the motion of air inside the human body, coming out through the chest and the voice box and through the mouth to shape sounds that have meaning. It's bodily.

  Robert Pinsky

  Air, Voice, Sound

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• On a practical level, poetry isn't something anybody has really made a great living at. I might sell some books and, once in a while, someone might pay to hear me read.

  Viggo Mortensen

  Book, Levels, Might

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• To share poetry is one of the most intimate acts of friendship possible.

  Madeleine L'Engle

  Intimate, Share

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• Poetry is like a portrait of a moment or person, and the poem is almost like looking at a photograph; it slaps you in the face and kisses you at the same time. Nothing else does that, with that brevity. Songs try to do it, but that's three minutes. A poem, you read it and it kind of changes your life and you don't know how it happened and you can never forget it. It's like the best song lyric, the best line from a film-everything in the world that's short and great put together.

  Warsan Shire

  Song, Kissing, Trying

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• What poetry is asking us to accept can be difficult. Our proximity to our mortality, the fragility of our existence, how close we live in every moment to nameless abysses, and the way language itself is beautifully, tragically, thrillingly insufficient...these are some of the engines that drive the poem. It's natural to want to turn away from these things. But we have to face them, as best we can, at least sometimes. Poetry can help us in that nearly impossible work.

  Matthew Zapruder

  Helping, Impossible, Language

  Source: www.guernicamag.com

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• I tend to like the way poets form communities. Writing can be lonely after all. Modern life can be lonely. Poets do seem to be more social than fiction writers. This could be because of poetry's roots in the oral tradition - poetry is read aloud and even performed. I'm just speculating, of course. At any rate, because poets form these groups, they learn from one another. That is one of the best things about being a poet.

  Rae Armantrout

  Lonely, Writing, Community

  Source: therumpus.net

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• Poetry is always in transformation. There are certain aspects of contemporary Italian poetry that are very preoccupied with politics and deconstruction and they don't deeply interest me. But that's the case in most cultures. We have our own Language Poetry, which doesn't interest me either.

  Jonathan W. Galassi

  Italian, Culture, Transformation

  Source: www.guernicamag.com

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• Poetry is an ongoing conversation with the past and the future and the present. I'm interested in that continuity, in that way of tying civilization together. It's like shoe laces, it holds things together.

  Jonathan W. Galassi

  Past, Together

  Source: www.guernicamag.com

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• There is something essential and necessary about the immediacy and democracy of poetry. If you look at the history of literature, poetry is the one enduring genre from Homer to Ashbery - no other literary form has lasted as long. The novel is only two or three hundred years old... And yes, it's mainstream if we look back, we often turn to poetry to encapsulate what was going on in a particular moment because it crystalizes the experience in a very condensed and meaningful way.

  Jonathan W. Galassi

  Meaningful, Long, Democracy

  Source: www.guernicamag.com

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• All of the arts are kin - music and sculpture and dance, those are wordless art forms. But poetry is defined by language. Of course, each art is distinct, and has its own character - not just in terms of media, but in terms of what seems to lie at the heart of it.

  Campbell McGrath

  Art, Lying, Character

  Source: therumpus.net

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• I read a lot of poetry. All types of poetry, but mostly Catalan poetry, because I believe poetry is the essence of language. Reading the classics, be they medieval or contemporary, gives me a stylistic energy that I'm very interested in.

  Jaume Cabre

  Reading, Believe, Giving

  Source: www.guernicamag.com

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• I think most good poetry is about suffering; I think that's what underlies the love in these landays pieces - suffering and longing.

  Eliza Griswold

  Thinking, Suffering, Longing

  Source: www.guernicamag.com

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• In most of the world, poetry has such a different reputation than it does in Western culture. Poetry is a popular genre in Afghanistan. If you turned on the radio, there would be a poetry program that would be as popular as The Real Housewives. People aren't listening to poetry as if they're taking their vitamins. Instead, it's a popular vessel you can fill with anything. You could fill it with sass. You could fill it with rage. You could fill it with political statements.

  Eliza Griswold

  Real, People, Political

  Source: www.guernicamag.com

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• Poetry is a way of being alone without feeling alone. It allows you to experience another mind, I suppose. And it does that more fully than other art forms, I think. It doesn't simply describe an experience, or a feeling, or a moment: it evokes it through, say, rhythm or tone or diction or metaphor. It creates a mood. A poem communicates before it is understood; it's not a fully paraphrasable form, which distinguishes it from other forms of writing.

  Nick Laird

  Art, Writing, Thinking

  Source: www.guernicamag.com

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• Poetry is perhaps the oldest art form. We can go back to an age-old idea of naming things, the Adamic impulse - to give something a name has always been an immensely powerful thing. To name something is to own it, to capture it. A poem is still a kind of spell, an incantation. Historically, a poem also invoked: it was a blessing, or a curse, or a charm. It had a motile power, was able to summon something into being. A poem is a special kind of speech-act. In a good poem there's the trance-like effect of language in its most concentrated, naked form.

  Nick Laird

  Art, Powerful, Blessing

  Source: www.guernicamag.com

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• I think that if poetry is not a personal act, it's a pamphlet.

  Maria Teresa Horta

  Thinking

  Source: www.guernicamag.com

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• My erotic poetry is not poetry that uses vernacular words. It is a very erotic poetry, but I never use anything, for example, that is not in the dictionary. I don't like to be ugly, I seek out what is beautiful, and if my great search is for freedom and beauty, I can't be vulgar, ordinary.

  Maria Teresa Horta

  Beautiful, Ugly, Vulgar

  Source: www.guernicamag.com

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• We do have to learn poetry at school. Poetry is interesting to me, particularly Chinese poetry. It's like an ancient form of song. There's five sentences, seven sentences - they're very different from English poetry. Chinese poetry is much more rigorous. You can only use this many words, and they will form some kind of rhythm so people can actually sing it. To me, poetry is quite abstract but also quite beautiful.

  Jenova Chen

  Beautiful, Song, School

  Source: www.guernicamag.com

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• Honestly, I can't understand English poetry. Because I am not an English speaker, when I read it I never know how to read it in the right rhythm.

  Jenova Chen

  Rhythm, Honestly, Speakers

  Source: www.guernicamag.com

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• I came to poetry because I felt I couldn't live properly in the real world.

  Lucie Brock-Broido

  Real, World, Real World

  Source: www.guernicamag.com

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