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

San Diego shaped me a lot. The visual landscapes, the emotional panoramas, the teachers and mentors I had from the third grade through San Diego High - it's all a big part of the poetry fountain that I continue to drink from.

Poetry is about the grief. Politics is about the grievance.

Poetry, at its best, is the language your soul would speak if you could teach your soul to speak.

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

Drawing is a way of coming upon the connection between things, just like metaphor in poetry reconnects what has become separated.

How can any one paint who cannot grade colors? How can any one write poetry who has not learnt to hear and see?

If I read a book and it makes my whole body so cold no fire can ever warm me, I know that is poetry.

Superstition is the poetry of life.

Poetry should... should strike the reader as a wording of his own highest thoughts, and appear almost a remembrance.

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

If you've ever been to a poetry slam, you know that the highest scoring emotion is self-righteous indignation: how dare you judge me. So in that way, the poem, 'What Teachers Make,' is an absolutely formulaic slam poem designed to allow me to get up on my soap box and say, 'Let me tell you what really makes me angry.'

Poetry is a way of taking life by the throat.

I don't think you can define how you acquire your imagination any more than you can define why one person has a sense of humor and another doesn't. But I certainly would lean to the side that says all those solitary hours of daydreaming were a kind of training for poetry.

For me, there is a paradox in poetry, which is like the paradox in tragedy. You have the most terrible subject, but it's in a form that is so sensually gratifying that it connects the surviving heart to the despairing intellect.

I have been enlightened. I have fallen into poetry and it has swallowed me up.

I do not see how a man can work on the frontiers of physics and write poetry at the same time. They are in opposition.

There are certain things in which mediocrity is not to be endured, such as poetry, music, painting, public speaking.

Poetry is a form of mathematics, a highly rigorous relationship with words.

A novel is a work of poetry. In order to write it, one must have tranquility of spirit and of impression.

Poetry and lyrics are very similar. Making words bounce off a page.

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.

When I was writing pretty poor poetry, this girl with midnight black hair told me to go on.

Nowadays, what an award gives is a sense of solidarity with the poetry guild, as it were: sustenance coming from the assent of your peers on the judging panel.

For an American, there's no automatic place where people love the art of poetry. There's not a social class that considers poetry its property the way in some countries there's a snob value to the art.

Science and art, or by the same token, poetry and prose differ from one another like a journey and an excursion. The purpose of the journey is its goal, the purpose of an excursion is the process.

A poem might be defined as thinking about feelings - about human feelings and frailties.

Poetry consists in a rhyming dictionary and things seen.

Poetry fettered, fetters the human race. Nations are destroyed or flourish in proportion as their poetry, painting, and music are destroyed or flourish.

So, poetry becomes a means for useful dialogue between people who are not only unknown, but mute to each other. It produces a dialogue among people that guards all of us against manipulation by our so-called leaders.

Poetry; a criticism of life under the conditions fixed for such a criticism by the laws of poetic truth and poetic beauty.

The moment of change is the only poem.

Not until the human heart is stolid to poetry, the human eye blind to beauty, not until the intellect ceases its quest for truth and conscience finds its quietus either in universal defeat or in triumphant success, will organized religion cease to be.

I wish our clever young poets would remember my homely definitions of prose and poetry; that is, prose = words in their best order; - poetry = the best words in the best order.

There was no market for poetry about trauma, abuse, loss, love, and healing through the lens of a Punjabi-Sikh immigrant woman.

All voices are important, and yet it seems that people of color have a lot to say, particularly if you look through the poetry of young people - a lot of questions and a lot of concerns about immigration and security issues, you name it - big questions.

I'm a great believer in poetry out of the classroom, in public places, on subways, trains, on cocktail napkins. I'd rather have my poems on the subway than around the seminar table at an MFA program.

I admire 'Adventure Time' for being a piece of art in the way that I think art should be. If you want to see it is poetry, you can, and if you don't, you can watch a fun cartoon.

In poetry, everything can be faked but the intensity of utterance.

I love reading all kinds of books. I usually have about ten books going at any one time - books about the past, the present, novels, non-fiction, poetry, mythology, religion, etc. Reading is my favorite thing to do.

There is no gender to my music. There's no male or female voice, no trite lyrics or poetry. It's much more abstract, so it lives with you longer.

Reality only reveals itself when it is illuminated by a ray of poetry.

We all need ways to express ourselves, and poetry is one of mine.

I write the occasional poem. I think my dabbling in poetry makes me better at screenplays. Poetry teaches the value of condensing, the importance of talking in a few words.

Rather than numbing or drowning out the difficult-to-describe but urgently sensed feelings that are part of being human, poetry invites us to tease them out, to draw them into language that is rooted in intricate thought and strange impulse.

How do poems grow? They grow out of your life.

Women who are inclined to write poetry at all are inspired by being mad at something.

To be poet laureate is to try to spread the love and the accessibility of poetry to young people.

When I was 18, I took a trip to Thailand with a friend. We stayed for a month. Bangkok was very raw for a teenager: there were no cellphones, no Internet, and the only music I had with me was this cassette by Liz Phair. I was writing a lot of poetry, and she embodied a talky style of songwriting that I found very accessible.

Poetry is the lifeblood of rebellion, revolution, and the raising of consciousness.