For me, I used to be shy towards journalism because it wasn't poetry. And then I realized that the events that I covered in essays that became journalism were actually great because they inspired me, and they became my muse.

Poetry is just the evidence of life. If your life is burning well, poetry is just the ash.

I think the term poet is a very exalted term and should be applied to a man at the end of his work. When he looks back over the body of his work and he's written poetry then let the verdict be that he's a poet.

Poetry is a phantom script telling how rainbows are made and why they go away.

It could be that all awful dictators are frustrated artists - Mao with his poetry and Mussolini with his monuments. Stalin was once a journalistic hack, and I can personally testify to how frustrated they are. Pol Pot left a very edgy photo collection behind. And Osama seems quite interested in video.

I began writing early - very, very early... I was already writing short stories for the radio and selling poems to poetry and art festivals; I was involved in school plays; I wrote essays, so there was no definite moment when I said, 'Now I'm a writer.' I've always been a writer.

Poetry is the one place where people can speak their original human mind. It is the outlet for people to say in public what is known in private.

Poetry is emotion put into measure. The emotion must come by nature, but the measure can be acquired by art.

In high school I was very much involved in poetry. You cannot read a poem quickly. There's too much going on there. There are rhythms and alliterations. You have to read poetry slow, slow, slow to absorb it all.

The blood jet is poetry and there is no stopping it.

Without touching my subject I want to come to the moment when, through pure concentration of seeing, the composed picture becomes more made than taken. Without a descriptive caption to justify its existence, it will speak for itself - less descriptive, more creative; less informative, more suggestive - less prose, more poetry.

I intended an Ode, And it turned to a Sonnet.

I read a little bit of nonfiction and a lot of poetry. I think of poetry as my shot of whiskey when I don't have time to savor a whole bottle of wine.

I got scouted for modeling on the street. I'm such a tomboy - still am. I just never thought about modeling before, but I thought, 'Ooh, interesting, similar world, perhaps it's a way into something.' Then, I was on my third photo shoot ever, and Adam Leech from 'Downtown Abbey' saw me reading poetry and asked me to recite some.

Plagiarism has been around far longer than the Internet. In fact, I had a poem published in 'Seventeen' magazine when I was 15 years old. About a year later I was informed that there was a girl who used that same poem to win a statewide poetry competition in Alabama. It took months for people to put together that this had happened.

When I was young, I reached a point where I found myself unable to pray. I was devastated by it. I missed being able to say words in my head that I believed could be heard by a being, a consciousness outside me. That is when I turned to poetry.

I was raised on songs of poetry like Simon and Garfunkel and Cat Stevens and Neil Young, etc. I love those old songs probably the most because they hit me so deep down in my core.

Learn poetry by heart. If you know a poem by heart, no one can take it away from you, and you can take advantage of it anytime.

Why should poetry have to make sense?

That metre itself forms an essential part of all true poetry is a principle which not even the assertions of an Aristotle or the pronouncements of a Plato can disestablish.

The crown of literature is poetry.

Verse in itself does not constitute poetry. Verse is only an elegant vestment for a beautiful form. Poetry can express itself in prose, but it does so more perfectly under the grace and majesty of verse. It is poetry of soul that inspires noble sentiments and noble actions as well as noble writings.

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

What my character is or how many jails I have lounged in, or wards or walls or wassails, how many lonely-heart poetry readings I have dodged, is beside the point. A man's soul or lack of it will be evident with what he can carve upon a white sheet of paper.

I don't like the word 'poetry,' and I don't like poetry readings, and I usually don't like poets. I would much prefer describing myself and what I do as: I'm kind of a curator, and I'm kind of a night-owl reporter.

When I am writing fiction, I believe I am much better organized, more methodical - one has to be when writing a novel. Writing poetry is a state of free float.

I felt like my favorite writers have almost musical hooks in their work, whether it's poetry or a hook at the end of a chapter that makes you want to read the next one. And I think that my favorite writers definitely have something musical about what they do, in saying something so relatable and universal and so simple.

There's a love of rhetorical skill in the Muslim world. Osama bin Laden doesn't just go on tape cassettes and say, 'America sucks.' He recites poetry; he finds things that 'America sucks' rhymes with.

Poetry is the art of uniting pleasure with truth.

A poet looks at the world the way a man looks at a woman.

Most people read poetry listening for echoes because the echoes are familiar to them. They wade through it the way a boy wades through water, feeling with his toes for the bottom: The echoes are the bottom.

In poetry, you must love the words, the ideas and the images and rhythms with all your capacity to love anything at all.

The first function of poetry is to tell the truth, to learn how to do that, to find out what you really feel and what you really think.

One thing I do know is that poetry, to be understood, must be clear.

Poetry is my cheap means of transportation. By the end of the poem the reader should be in a different place from where he started. I would like him to be slightly disoriented at the end, like I drove him outside of town at night and dropped him off in a cornfield.

Poetry can do a lot of things to people. I mean it can improve your imagination. It can take you to new places. It can give you this incredible form of verbal pleasure.

When I was in college, I really liked poetry. I don't read much anymore.

History shows us that in times of people feeling like they are in need of some sort of rebellion or protests, the artists rise because the poetry we create about pain and its relationship to culture in the world begins to soothe and heal people who are feeling confused or afraid.

I see poetry as spiritual medicine.

I come here to speak poetry. It will always be in the grass. It will also be necessary to bend down to hear it. It will always be too simple to be discussed in assemblies.

Poetry is what we do to break bread with the dead.

Poetry is more a threshold than a path.

If a line of poetry strays into my memory, my skin bristles so that the razor ceases to act.

I have felt great advances in my poetry, the main one being a growing victory over word nuances and a superfluity of adjectives.

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

Poetry seems to sink into us the way prose doesn't. I can still quote verses I learned when I was very young, but I have trouble remembering one line of a novel I just finished reading.

The music just tends to be a vehicle for that poetry.

A very intimate sense of the expressiveness of outward things, which ponders, listens, penetrates, where the earlier, less developed consciousness passed lightly by, is an important element in the general temper of our modern poetry.

I have been writing poetry for a long time now. I started writing in my school days.

There is poetry as soon as we realize that we possess nothing.