Poetry Is Quotes - Page 30

• Can poetry be a form of social change? I don't know the answer to that. I do think art can have a social impact even if it may be difficult to see the effects of that impact, to assess or measure it.

  Dawn Lundy Martin

  Art, Thinking, Difficult

  Source: therumpus.net

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• I think the occupation of my poetry is akin to this desire to be many things at once - things that sometimes conflict. Regarding how the quotidian makes its way into the work, it's all of it, in a way. Like, when I'm writing poems, I'm just picking up scraps of whatever is happening around me - a geographical location, a love affair failed, the day the air felt like rope.

  Dawn Lundy Martin

  Writing, Thinking, Desire

  Source: therumpus.net

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• When I devoted myself to poetry - and poetry is a very serious medium - I don't think the people that knew me as an individual with that tongue-in-cheek kind of humor...well, it didn't always lend itself to my poetry. When you're writing poetry, it's like working with gold, you can't waste anything. You have to be very economical with each word you're going to select. But when you're writing fiction, you can just go on and on; you can be more playful. My editor's main task is to cut back, not ask for more.

  Ana Castillo

  Writing, Cutting, Thinking

  Source: www.english.illinois.edu

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• The whole process of having to put the thing into the world seems so antithetical to the act of writing. Poetry is slightly easier, because there's less money and fewer people involved. You just let a book of poems trickle out in the world, and it finds its own people. Novels are much harder, and you don't think you should have to do some of the things you're made to do.

  Nick Laird

  Book, Writing, Thinking

  Source: www.interviewmagazine.com

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• Durable, memorable poetry is usually alert to complexity. A really good poem gives you a reason to read it 20 times, because the language in a good poem is doing a lot of work emotionally and a lot of work intellectually. That means durable poetry can help us think about complexity, can help us resist easy answers and help us step back. And it can help us sometimes calm down, and sometimes it can help us stay upset.

  Stephen Burt

  Memorable, Mean, Thinking

  Source: www.washingtonpost.com

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• It really takes growing up to treasure the specialness of being different. Now I understand that I've gotten to enjoy things that others have not, whether it's the laughter, the poetry of my Spanish language - I love Spanish poetry, because my grandmother loved it - our food, our music. Everything about my culture has given me enormous education and joy.

  Sonia Sotomayor

  Laughter, Growing Up, Grandmother

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• Poetry is basically built out of what I think of as being a fairly political act at its core: "I'm not going to listen to how you described things. I'm going to look at them much more intensely and carefully than most people do, and certainly more intensely than our culture wants us to." The mission of the poem, of course, is to try to find the way to do that in the smallest amount of space possible.

  Ted Genoways

  Thinking, People, Political

  Source: www.guernicamag.com

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• To me, poetry is a rational act. I never write a poem if I'm not sure what I am going to say or what I want to communicate.

  Luljeta Lleshanaku

  Writing, Not Sure, Communicate

  Source: www.guernicamag.com

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• Thinking in prose is different. I gained an immense amount of respect for people who write prose, and also felt even more sure that the thinking particular to poetry is essential to my life. I need to think, to explore, to question, in poetry. Without that feeling, I am, in some ultimate way, lost.

  Matthew Zapruder

  Writing, Thinking, People

  Source: www.guernicamag.com

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• All my closest friends came to me through poetry. My wife, too! Other than my family, poetry is the gravitational force of my life.

  Matthew Zapruder

  Wife, My Family, My Wife

  Source: www.guernicamag.com

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• I don't think poetry needs to be "easily understandable." First of all, there are often complexities of syntax, form, unfamiliar absences, etc., that require a deeper concentration than is usually demanded of us. So that, right off the bat, is a little difficult. Then there is the deeper issue of what poetry is really asking of us. I feel it is asking us to read with great, even sacred, care and attention. That, too, is difficult. It requires discipline and the creation of a temporary zone of privacy, which is inimical to our current conditions of life.

  Matthew Zapruder

  Thinking, Discipline, Attention

  Source: www.guernicamag.com

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• Poetry is a sword of lightning, ever unsheathed, which consumes the scabbard that would contain it.

  Percy Bysshe Shelley

  Lightning

  Percy Bysshe Shelley, Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley (1840). “A defence of poetry. Essay on the literature, arts, and manners of the Athenians. Preface to the Banquet of Plato. The banquet”, p.40

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• As for the usefulness of poetry, its uses are many. It is the deification of reality.

  Edith Sitwell

  Art, Reality, Poetry

  "Young Poets". Edith Sitwell's lecture (1957); later published in "Mightier Than the Sword: The P.E.N. Hermon Ould Memorial Lectures, 1953-1961" (p. 56), 1964.

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• Poetry is a beautiful way of expressing feelings - happy, sad, angry, caring. It's also a way that we share with other people, to help them with those feelings.

  Mattie Stepanek

  Beautiful, Caring, People

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• Yet, it is true, poetry is delicious; the best prose is that which is most full of poetry.

  Virginia Woolf

  Writing, Prose And Poetry, Delicious

  Virginia Woolf (2013). “The Common Reader”, p.61, Lulu Press, Inc

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• Poetry is the way we help give name to the nameless so it can be thought.

  Audre Lorde

  Names, Giving, Way

  Audre Lorde (2012). “Sister Outsider: Essays and Speeches”, p.37, Crossing Press

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• Prose is walking; poetry is flying

  Galway Kinnell

  Flying, Prose, Walking

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• Poetry is the language of intensity. Because we are going to die, an expression of intensity is justified.

  C.D. Wright

  Death, Expression, Poetry

  C.D. Wright (2012). “Cooling Time: An American Poetry Vigil”, p.61, Copper Canyon Press

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• To me, poetry is somebody standing up, so to speak, and saying, with as little concealment as possible, what it is for him or her to be on earth at this moment

  Galway Kinnell

  Earth, Littles, Speak

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• Poetry is a rich, full-bodied whistle, cracked ice crunching in pails, the night that numbs the leaf, the duel of two nightingales, the sweet pea that has run wild, Creation's tears in shoulder blades.

  Boris Pasternak

  Running, Sweet, Night

  LIFE magazine, June 13, 1960.

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• Real poetry, is to lead a beautiful life. To live poetry is better than to write it.

  Matsuo Basho

  Beautiful, Real, Writing

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• To elevate the soul, poetry is necessary.

  Edgar Allan Poe

  Soul

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• It takes most men five years to recover from a college education, and to learn that poetry is as vital to thinking as knowledge.

  Brooks Atkinson

  Graduation, College, Men

  Brooks Atkinson (1951). “Once around the sun”

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• Poetry is an act of peace.

  Pablo Neruda

  Poetry

  Pablo Neruda (1977). “Memoirs”

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• Poetry is like a bird, it ignores all frontiers.

  Yevgeny Yevtushenko

  Poetry, Bird, New Frontiers

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