“If I feel physically as if the top of my head were taken off, I know that is poetry.”
Poetry says in twenty words what prose takes two hundred to approximate. These quotes explore the craft, the beauty, and the necessity of verse — from poets who live for it and readers who are grateful they do.
“Manifesting that order of poetry where we can at last grow up to that which we stored up as we grew.”
“If I feel physically as if the top of my head were taken off, I know that is poetry.”
“Poetry is a political act because it involves telling the truth.”
“We read Robert Browning's poetry. Here we needed no guidance from the professor: the poems themselves were enough.”
“Poetry is something that happens in universities, in creative writing programs or in English departments.”
“Poetry should... should strike the reader as a wording of his own highest thoughts, and appear almost a remembrance.”
“Poetry is just the evidence of life. If your life is burning well, poetry is just the ash.”
“I would say that American poetry has always been a poetry of personal testimony.”
“The fact that something is in a rhymed form or in blank verse will not make it good poetry.”
“One of the most powerful devices of poetry is the use of distortions. You can go from talking about the way a minute passes to the way a century passes, or a lifetime.”
“Perhaps no person can be a poet, or even enjoy poetry, without a certain unsoundness of mind.”
“The poet is a liar who always speaks the truth.”
“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.”
“It's something we, guys, have all done. Made tapes for girls, trying to impress them, to meet them on a shared plane of aesthetics. Read them someone else's poetry because they do poetry better than you could do it, because you're too awkward to do it.”
“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.”
“I'm perfectly happy when I look out at an audience and it's all women. I always think it's kind of odd, but then, more women than men, I think, read and write poetry.”