3 December 2020 Russell Simmons I want to promote poetry to the point where you got all the baldhead kids running around doing poetry, getting the music out of the way and having only words, the spoken word, and then see what happens.
3 December 2020 Ben Okri I’m conscious of a series of circles working its way through my life. And at this particular moment I have come round to the beginning of my writing cycle. It begins with poetry. There’s hardly a day that goes past on which I don’t write poetry.
3 December 2020 Eli Khamarov Poets are soldiers that liberate words from the steadfast possession of definition.
3 December 2020 Jerry B. Jenkins Gil Thorpe is a great diversion and is to book writing as poetry is to prose.
3 December 2020 Archie Shepp In rap music, even though the element of poetry is very strong, so is the element of the drum, the implication of the dance. Without the beat, its commercial value would certainly be more tenuous.
3 December 2020 Ryszard Kapuscinski The tradition of Russian literature is also an eastern tradition of learning poetry and prose by heart.
3 December 2020 Seamus Heaney Manifesting that order of poetry where we can at last grow up to that which we stored up as we grew.
3 December 2020 Anne Stevenson A poem might be defined as thinking about feelings – about human feelings and frailties.
3 December 2020 Philip Levine Now I think poetry will save nothing from oblivion, but I keep writing about the ordinary because for me it’s the home of the extraordinary, the only home.
3 December 2020 Will Cuppy I don’t like to boast, but I have probably skipped more poetry than any other person of my age and weight in this country.
3 December 2020 Rita Dove I try to show what it is about language and music that enthralls, because I think those are the two elements of poetry.
3 December 2020 James Laughlin We don’t attempt to have any theme for a number of the anthology, or to have any particular sequence. We just put in things that we like, and then we try to alternate the prose and the poetry.
3 December 2020 Tom Hanks It’s always a combination of physics and poetry that I find inspiring. It’s hard to wrap your head around things like the Hubble scope.
3 December 2020 Diane Wakoski I have always wanted what I have now come to call the voice of personal narrative. That has always been the appealing voice in poetry. It started for me lyrically in Shakespeare’s sonnets.
3 December 2020 Elia Kazan Stylized acting and direction is to realistic acting and direction as poetry is to prose.
3 December 2020 Mark Strand And yet, in a culture like ours, which is given to material comforts, and addicted to forms of entertainment that offer immediate gratification, it is surprising that so much poetry is written.
3 December 2020 A. E. Housman Even when poetry has a meaning, as it usually has, it may be inadvisable to draw it out… Perfect understanding will sometimes almost extinguish pleasure.
3 December 2020 Robert Morgan I learned to impersonate the kind of person that talks about poetry. It comes from teaching, I think.
3 December 2020 Jane Campion And, I mean, I think poetry does need to be met to some extent, especially, I guess, 19th century poetry, and for me, it’s just been so worth the effort. It’s like I’m planting a garden in my head.
3 December 2020 June Jordan 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.
3 December 2020 Trevor McDonald Poetry says the things that I can’t say. I read a lot, but I never write it.
3 December 2020 Aristotle Poetry is finer and more philosophical than history for poetry expresses the universal, and history only the particular.
3 December 2020 Stephen Sondheim One difference between poetry and lyrics is that lyrics sort of fade into the background. They fade on the page and live on the stage when set to music.
3 December 2020 Kenneth Koch I was influenced by surrealist poetry and painting as were thousands of other people, and it seems to me to have become a part of the way I write, but it’s not.
3 December 2020 Charles Simic Poetry is an orphan of silence. The words never quite equal the experience behind them.
3 December 2020 Annie Lennox I want to branch out. I want to write. I write poetry. I want to see my children grow up well.
3 December 2020 John Millington Synge It is the timber of poetry that wears most surely, and there is no timber that has not strong roots among the clay and worms.
3 December 2020 Diane Wakoski Distinctly American poetry is usually written in the context of one’s geographic landscape, sometimes out of one’s cultural myths, and often with reference to gender and race or ethnic origins.
