3 December 2020 John Ashbery I don’t look on poetry as closed works. I feel they’re going on all the time in my head and I occasionally snip off a length.
3 December 2020 Eugenio Montale Narrative art, the novel, from Murasaki to Proust, has produced great works of poetry.
3 December 2020 Diane Wakoski Still, language is resilient, and poetry when it is pressured simply goes underground.
3 December 2020 Robert Morgan Teaching writing over the years intrudes on your own writing in important ways, taking away some of the excitement of poetry.
3 December 2020 Steven Pinker Art works because it appeals to certain faculties of the mind. Music depends on details of the auditory system, painting and sculpture on the visual system. Poetry and literature depend on language.
3 December 2020 Anthony Hecht There’s not a good poet I know who has not at the beck and call of his memory a vast quantity of poetry that composes his mental library.
3 December 2020 Marguerite Young I’m quite sure that most writers would sustain real poetry if they could, but it takes devotion and talent.
3 December 2020 Glen Hansard If you don’t mark your successes, the day your ship comes in could be just another day at the office, and there’s no poetry in that.
3 December 2020 Leonard Cohen Poetry is just the evidence of life. If your life is burning well, poetry is just the ash.
3 December 2020 J. Carter Brown I found that it wasn’t so oddball to like music and poetry and visual arts, they’re kindred spirits.
3 December 2020 Percy Bysshe Shelley Poetry is a sword of lightning, ever unsheathed, which consumes the scabbard that would contain it.
3 December 2020 Karen Armstrong A theology should be like poetry, which takes us to the end of what words and thoughts can do.
3 December 2020 Tobias Wolff I believe that the short story is as different a form from the novel as poetry is, and the best stories seem to me to be perhaps closer in spirit to poetry than to novels.
3 December 2020 Robert Penn Warren The poem is a little myth of man’s capacity of making life meaningful. And in the end, the poem is not a thing we see-it is, rather, a light by which we may see-and what we see is life.
3 December 2020 John Updike Writing criticism is to writing fiction and poetry as hugging the shore is to sailing in the open sea.
3 December 2020 J. K. Rowling Every now and then I read a poem that does touch something in me, but I never turn to poetry for solace or pleasure in the way that I throw myself into prose.
3 December 2020 Peter Davison Dealing with poetry is a daunting task, simply because the reason one does it as an editor at all is because one is constantly coming to terms with one’s own understanding of how to understand the world.
3 December 2020 Ezra Pound Colloquial poetry is to the real art as the barber’s wax dummy is to sculpture.
3 December 2020 John Betjeman Too many people in the modern world view poetry as a luxury, not a necessity like petrol. But to me it’s the oil of life.
3 December 2020 Lewis Thomas The cloning of humans is on most of the lists of things to worry about from Science, along with behaviour control, genetic engineering, transplanted heads, computer poetry and the unrestrained growth of plastic flowers.
3 December 2020 Janine Turner I have always written poetry but I have never applied it to songwriting.
3 December 2020 Robert Morgan I did not have a very literary background. I came to poetry from the sciences and mathematics, and also through an interest in Japanese and Chinese poetry in translation.
3 December 2020 Frank Iero Publishing the lyric books, poetry or comics of other musicians I know. That’s the thing I really want to break into!
