Poetry Is Quotes - Page 24

• Poetry is the skin that I have between my body and the world's body.

  Lucie Brock-Broido

  Skins

  Source: www.guernicamag.com

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• There is an idealism associated with poetry I would not dispel but question. It doesn't change anything except within. It shifts your insides around. Poetry is not going to reach the numbers of people by which we commonly consider a large audience. It just isn't a stadium-filler. It could still galvanize people during a crisis, but let's just say there are two points at which poetry is indispensable to people - at the point of love and the point of death. I'll second that emotion.

  C.D. Wright

  People, Emotion, Idealism

  Source: www.guernicamag.com

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• Poetry is poetry. My process is I try to write the best poem I can, in the best way to communicate whatever it is the poem is trying to communicate, and then I try to figure out the best way to present that poem to a live audience. It's all craft, just different stages of craft.

  Bao Phi

  Writing, Trying, Different

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• There is no one who can stop you; you find a mic, a crowd, a set of ears, and nowadays, a camera and YouTube, and you recite your poem. You have your say. I don't want to over-romanticize it: of course, any time an art form ascends, especially when competition is involved, there will be gatekeeping, chauvinism, and other unfortunate dynamics. But the beauty of spoken word and performance poetry is, by and large, its ability to reach people in the moment - right there, right then.

  Bao Phi

  Art, People, Competition

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• One of the most famous lines in contemporary Russian poetry is "Erica makes four copies and that's enough." That's the ethos we're aiming for. This is not to say I don't want lots of people to read my book, I do. I especially want people to read it who will feel better, and safer, or at least understood.

  Masha Gessen

  Book, Feel Better, People

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• Writing is a bit like walking into a big bookstore. It's the bookstore of your brain, and you know you're never going to read all those books. It makes you happy you're in the bookstore, and you're nervous because you know you're never going to read all those books. So the nervousness is also happy. Once I get going writing poetry is one of the happiest things I do, but it is also fraught with all of these anxieties.

  Mary Jo Salter

  Book, Writing, Anxiety

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• Political poetry is the hardest thing to write because you cannot preach to the converted, and if you're only seeking to convert, then write an editorial. I hope I can write about Trump; he's too major a force not to be written about.

  Mary Jo Salter

  Writing, Political

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• Poetry is the work of poets, not of peoples or communities; artistic creation can never be anything but the production of an individual mind.

  Lascelles Abercrombie

  Community, Mind, Artistic Creation

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• The poet exposes himself to the risk. All that has been said about poetry, all that he has learned about poetry, is only a partial assurance.

  A. R. Ammons

  Risk, Poet, Said

  A. R. Ammons (1996). “Set in motion: essays, interviews, and dialogues”, Univ of Michigan Pr

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• If we ask a vague question, such as, 'What is poetry?' we expect a vague answer, such as, 'Poetry is the music of words,' or 'Poetry is the linguistic correction of disorder.'

  A. R. Ammons

  Answers, Disorder, What Is Poetry

  A. R. Ammons (1996). “Set in motion: essays, interviews, and dialogues”, Univ of Michigan Pr

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• Poetry is rather an approach to things, to life, than it is typographical production.

  Joseph Brodsky

  Approach, Productions

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• Poetry is the art of substantiating shadows, and of lending existence to nothing.

  Edmund Burke

  Art, Poetry, Shadow

  James Prior, Edmund Burke (1826). “Memoir of the Life and Character of the Right Hon. Edmund Burke: With Specimens of His Poetry and Letters and an Estimate of His Genius and Talents, Compared with Those of His Great Contemporaries. Enlarged to Two Volumes”, p.511

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• I always thought that poetry is the verdict that others give to a certain kind of writing. So to call yourself a poet is a kind of dangerous description. It's for others; it's for others to use.

  Leonard Cohen

  Writing, Giving, Use

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• I have piles of poetry books in the bathroom, on the stairs, everywhere. The only way to write poetry is to read it.

  Carol Ann Duffy

  Book, Writing, Way

  "Carol Ann Duffy: 'Poetry is in your everyday life, your memory, in what people say on the bus .. or just what's in your heart'". www.mirror.co.uk. May 2, 2009.

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• All poetry is an ordered voice, one which tries to tell you about a vision in the un-visionary language of farm, city, and love.

  Paul Engle

  Love, Cities, Voice

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• A glance at the history of European poetry is enough to inform us that rhyme itself is not indispensable. Latin poetry in the classical age had no use for it, and the kind of Latin poetry that does rhyme - as for instance the medieval Carmina Burana - tends to be somewhat crude stuff in comparison with the classical verse that doesn't.

  James Fenton

  Latin, Age, Doe

  "It ain't necessarily so" by James Fenton, www.theguardian.com. October 18, 2002.

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• Poetry is as precise a thing as geometry.

  Gustave Flaubert

  Geometry, Precise

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• Thomas Davis was a great man where poetry is concerned, and a better than Thomas Moore. All over Ireland his poetry is, and he would have done other things but that he died young.

  Lady Gregory

  Men, Done, Young

  Lady Gregory (2013). “The Essential Lady Gregory Collection”, p.521, eBookIt.com

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• Poetry is the universal language which the heart holds with nature and itself. He who has a contempt for poetry, cannot have much respect for himself, or for anything else.

  William Hazlitt

  Heart, Language, Contempt

  William Hazlitt (1845). “Lectures on the English Poets”, p.1

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• Often I find that poems predict what I'm going to do later in my own writing, and often I find that poems predict my life. So I think poetry is the most intense expression of feeling that we have.

  Erica Jong

  Writing, Thinking, Expression

  FaceBook post by Erica Jong from Mar 01, 2016

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• Poetry is the language we speak in the most terrifying or ecstatic passages of our lives. But the very word poetry scares people. They think of their grade school teachers reciting 'Hiawatha' and they groan.

  Erica Jong

  Teacher, School, Thinking

  "Love Comes First" by Erica Jong, www.huffingtonpost.com. March 2, 2009.

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• Poetry is something to make us wiser and better, by continually revealing those types of beauty and truth, which God has set in all men's souls.

  James Russell Lowell

  Beauty, Men, Soul

  James Russell Lowell (1844). “Poems”

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• Poetry is like making a joke. If you get one word wrong at the end of a joke, you've lost the whole thing.

  W. S. Merwin

  Poetry, Lost, Ends

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• I don't think poetry is something that can be taught. We can encourage young writers, but what you can't teach them is the very essence of poetry.

  Robert Morgan

  Thinking, Essence, Taught

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• If a poem is not memorable, there's probably something wrong. One of the problems of free verse is that much of the free verse poetry is not memorable.

  Robert Morgan

  Memorable, Problem, Verses

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