As I grew older - collapsing into my seventies, glimpsing ahead the cliffs of the eighties, colliding into eighty-five - poetry abandoned me.

Poetry is the deification of reality.

There's a fierce practicality and empiricism which the whole imaginative, lyrical aspect of poetry comes from.

Poetry is a street fighter. It has sharp elbows. It can look after itself. Poetry can't be used for manipulation; it's why you never see good poetry in advertising.

By definition, poetry works with qualities and dynamics that mainstream society is reluctant to face head-on. It's an interesting phenomenon that by necessity, poetry is just below the radar.

A theology should be like poetry, which takes us to the end of what words and thoughts can do.

One does not read a poem by Gwendolyn Brooks with hopes that it will grant him a career in engineering; he does so because poetry helps him see something in the world that he might not have seen before.

I spent many years in college studying English literature. I was on the verge of attending grad school to get a Ph.D. in Renaissance poetry - my lost careers were being a writer, artist, or academic. Do I regret spending all that time poring over Shakespeare when I could have been getting a jump start on the competition? Not at all.

The single thing I've found it valuable to memorize is poetry.

To be under occupation, to be under siege, is not a good inspiration for poetry.

Photography, painting or poetry - those are just extensions of me, how I perceive things; they are my way of communicating.

Poetry has always been made to seem kind of cultish. But the truth is, everybody really loves it! It's much more mainstream than anyone thought.

I did not move into developing or processing color. I stayed with black and white. I still think to this day that I prefer to work in black and white if it has to do with poetry or anything other than specific reality. I have worked in color when I thought it was the appropriate way to express the thought that I was working on.

There are better ways we can transform this virulent hatred - by living our ideals, the Peace Corps, exchange students, teachers, exporting our music, poetry, blue jeans.

Poetry. I read Walt Whitman, Emily Dickinson, and Jane Hirschfield. I like to read Billy Collins out loud.

In fact, in lyric poetry, truthfulness becomes recognizable as a ring of truth within the medium itself.

The experimental poetry thing is not my thing. It's a programme of the avant-garde: basically a refusal of the kind of poetry I write.

I credit poetry for making this space-walk possible.

Anybody serious about poetry knows how hard it is to achieve anything worthwhile in it.

I dabbled in writing, wrote really bad poetry in high school. I also took a few writing classes when I was an undergrad at Stanford. I was so intimidated.

Existential philosophy, poetry and art - just like sadness - were all unavoidable to a tender young man in the meat works.

Freedom is poetry, taking liberties with words, breaking the rules of normal speech, violating common sense. Freedom is violence.

'Hamilton' is, of course, closely tied to the Obamas because Lin first performed the opening number at a White House poetry jam.

This assumption that the blue collar crowd is not supposed to read it, or a farmer in his overalls is not to read poetry, seems to be dangerous if not tragic.

To translate poetry, one has to possess some art, at the very least the art of stylistic re-embodiment.

My hobbies are playing piano and guitar, pining for girls, worrying about climate change, pining for girls, and the poetry of John Keats.

I came to poetry through the urgent need to denounce injustice, exploitation, humiliation. I know that's not enough to change the world. But to remain silent would have been a kind of intolerable complicity.

If our hearts are ready for anything, we are touched by the beauty and poetry and mystery that fill our world.

I have experienced healing through other writers' poetry, but there's no way I can sit down to write in the hope a poem will have healing potential. If I do, I'll write a bad poem.

It would probably surprise people to know that I'm interested in wildlife. I read a lot of poetry, too.

One culture I find fascinating to juxtapose against American culture is the culture of Germany. They've gone through a long process through their art, poetry, public discourse, their politics, of owning the fact of their complicity in what happened in World War II. It's still a topic of everyday conversation in Germany.

Poetry privileges music and is aesthetically more challenging. Prose privileges information and is emotionally more challenging.

You don't have to suffer to be a poet; adolescence is enough suffering for anyone.

Poetic talent doesn't operate in a vacuum. There is a spirit of Polish poetry.

In the language of poetry, where every word is weighed, nothing is usual or normal. Not a single stone and not a single cloud above it. Not a single day and not a single night after it. And above all, not a single existence, not anyone's existence in this world.

Well, I write a lot of poetry - that's where it usually all starts. I definitely want to show you guys sides of me - love, loss, heartbreak - all of that good stuff!

Nothing is too small. Nothing is too, quote-unquote, ordinary or insignificant. Those are the things that make up the measure of our days, and they're the things that sustain us. And they're the things that certainly can become worthy of poetry.

The poetry that sustains me is when I feel that, for a minute, the clouds have parted and I've seen ecstasy or something.

Poetry, it is often said and loudly so, is life's true mirror. But a monkey looking into a work of literature looks in vain for Socrates.

I've been writing since I was 10 or 11. I started with poetry because that was the easiest thing. It just kind of came naturally. I think at that time West Coast hip hop was huge; all these kids around me were like, 'I want to be a rapper.' But I'm a white girl, not going to be a rapper.

What we know is that Shakespeare wrote perhaps the most remarkable body of passionate love poetry in the English language to a young man.

To me, art begets art. Painting feeds the eye just as poetry feeds the ear, which is to say that both feed the soul.

When I was younger, I felt it was my duty to wake people up. I thought poetry was asleep. I thought rock 'n' roll was asleep.

I came into music because I thought the presentation of poetry wasn't vibrant enough. So I merged improvised poetry with basic rock chords. That was my original mission.

What I wanted to do in rock 'n roll was merge poetry with sonic scapes, and the two people who had contributed so much to that were Jimi Hendrix and Jim Morrison.

I'm not really a musician. I'm a performer, and I love rock n' roll. I've embraced rock n' roll because it encompasses all the things I'm interested in: poetry, revolution, sexuality, political activism - all of these things can be found in rock n' roll.

I didn't love Jim Morrison 'cause he was self-destructive. I loved him because of his work. Because of the way he merged poetry and rock-and-roll. Because he did something new.

On the other hand, if there's an underlying core of poetry that I go to, I go to the sea. I've lived on the sea all my life. I live on the sea in Cape Breton.

Children seem naturally drawn to poetry - it's some combination of the rhyme, rhythm, and the words themselves.

Spoken word poetry is the art of performance poetry. I tell people it involves creating poetry that doesn't just want to sit on paper, that something about it demands it be heard out loud or witnessed in person.