Anyone who regards poetry as an entertainment, as a 'read,' commits an anthropological crime, in the first place against himself.

American poetry to me is a sort of relentless, nonstop sermon on human autonomy.

Tyranny will make an entire population into readers of poetry.

American poetry is this country's greatest patrimony. It takes a stranger to see some things clearly. This is one of them, and I am that stranger.

Poetry isn't just different from prose, it's more important for the human species.

The charge frequently leveled against poetry - that it is difficult, obscure, hermetic and whatnot - indicates not the state of poetry but, frankly, the rung of the evolutionary ladder on which society is stuck.

People who buy 'The National Enquirer' would buy poetry. They should be given a choice. I'm absolutely serious.

In my late teenage years, I developed a real passion for it, and wrote a lot of poetry.

Never fear: Thank Home, and Poetry, and the Force behind both.

Poetry heals the wounds inflicted by reason.

A poet's autobiography is his poetry. Anything else is just a footnote.

Is there any purpose to translating poetry? A poem does not contain information of importance, like a signpost or a warning notice.

I always loved singing and writing poetry. I always loved music, and I've loved writing my whole life. When I put them together, it was probably in my early 20s where I put words to music for the first time.

Everyone thinks they're going to write one book of poems or one novel.

You're in high school, and you're telling your friends that you're skipping lunch to go write poetry, and they were all questioning my sexuality.

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.

None but a poet can write a tragedy. For tragedy is nothing less than pain transmuted into exaltation by the alchemy of poetry.

I thought we were gonna open up the world of poetry and music to all kinds of things, and yet, I can't really think of anyone who's done anything like it since.

I think it comes from really liking literary forms. Poetry is very beautiful, but the space on the page can be as affecting as where the text is. Like when Miles Davis doesn't play, it has a poignancy to it.

If you go into a bar in most places in America and even say the word poetry, you'll probably get beaten up. But poetry is a really strong, beautiful form to me, and a lot of innovation in language comes from poetry.

Writing poetry, which for me was then saying how I felt about this and that, didn't help me to understand the world I lived in.

I developed a definition - which I think becomes less and less accurate as poetry moves into the world - that poetry was a way of speaking to the world, but fiction was a way to get the world to speak to me.

Sometimes poetry, it is incomprehensible. But we need incomprehensible stuff! It is very healthy to talk about incomprehensible things! It is very healthy! We need it!

I'm a storyteller: the crux of the matter is to reach beauty, poetry; it doesn't matter if that is comedy or tragedy. They're the same if you reach the beauty.

Poetry is the utterance of deep and heart-felt truth - the true poet is very near the oracle.

The major poets of New Jersey have all suffered, whether it's Whitman, who lost his job for 'Leaves of Grass,' or William Carlos Williams, who was called a communist, or Ginsberg, whose 'Howl' was prosecuted, or myself. If you practise poetry the way I think it needs to be done, you're going to put yourself in jeopardy.

Poetry lies its way to the truth.

I cannot speak for more than an hour exclusively about poetry. At that point, life itself takes over again.

Unfortunately, poetry is not born in noise, in crowds, or on a bus. There have to be four walls and the certainty that the telephone will not ring. That's what writing is all about.

Solitude is very important in my work as a mode of inspiration, but isolation is not good in this respect. I am not writing poetry about isolation.

One of the things that distinguishes poetry from ordinary speech is that in a very few number of words, poetry captures some kind of deep feeling, and rhythm is the way to get there. Rhythm is the way the poetry carries itself.

If you have so earth-creeping a mind that it cannot lift itself up to look to the sky of poetry... thus much curse I must send you, in the behalf of all poets, that while you live, you live in love, and never get favour for lacking skill of a sonnet; and, when you die, your memory die from the earth for want of an epitaph.

Writing dark poetry was always my escape.

I think one of the things that people tend to forget is that poets do write out of life. It isn't some set piece that then gets put up on the shelf, but that the impetus, the real instigation for poetry is everything that's happening around us.

I try to show what it is about language and music that enthralls, because I think those are the two elements of poetry.

Have you ever heard a good joke? If you've ever heard someone just right, with the right pacing, then you're already on the way to poetry. It's about using words in very precise ways and using gesture.

Instead of trying to come up and pontificate on what literature is, you need to talk with children, to teachers, and make sure they get poetry in the curriculum early.

There are distinct duties of a poet laureate. I plan a reading series at the Library of Congress and advise the librarian. The rest is how I want to promote poetry.

I was apprehensive. I feared every time I talked about poetry, it would be filtered through the lens of race, sex, and age.

I see a resurgence of interest in poetry. I am less optimistic about the prospects for the arts when it comes to federal funding.

Prose on certain occasions can bear a great deal of poetry; on the other hand, poetry sinks and swoons under a moderate weight of prose.

I was one of those dark, quiet kids that wrote poetry.

Hebrew as a contemporary language, especially for poetry, is no longer the language of the Bible; but neither is it not the language of the Bible.

Fiction and poetry are my first loves, but the really beautiful lyrical essay can do so much that other forms cannot.

I don't think you get to good writing unless you expose yourself and your feelings. Deep songs don't come from the surface; they come from the deep down. The poetry and the songs that you are suppose to write, I believe are in your heart.

Whether you like modern incarnations of what country radio hits are, or you like what I'm doing, or you like something really off in folk, poetry Americana land, it's all just music, man. If you like one of them, great - go buy it.

What's the function of poetry? It's to express general truths, to connect with the reader and make him think: 'Wow, I've experienced that, but you've expressed it so much better.'

Poetry is above all a concentration of the power of language, which is the power of our ultimate relationship to everything in the universe.

The poetry of a people comes from the deep recesses of the unconscious, the irrational and the collective body of our ancestral memories.

If you read quickly to get through a poem to what it means, you have missed the body of the poem.