3 December 2020 Nicholson Baker So I really began as a failed poet – although when I first wanted to be a writer, I learned to write prose by reading poetry.
3 December 2020 Seamus Heaney A public expectation, it has to be said, not of poetry as such but of political positions variously approvable by mutually disapproving groups.
3 December 2020 Peter Abrahams With Shakespeare and poetry, a new world was born. New dreams, new desires, a self consciousness was born. I desired to know to know myself in terms of the new standards set by these books.
3 December 2020 David Antin I hardly remember how I started to write poetry. It’s hard to imagine what I thought poetry could do.
3 December 2020 Rita Dove The poetry that sustains me is when I feel that, for a minute, the clouds have parted and I’ve seen ecstasy or something.
3 December 2020 Sherman Alexie You know, people speak in poetry all the time. They just don’t realize it.
3 December 2020 Macklemore Reading a piece of poetry with no beat in front of 20 people is way more challenging than rocking for 10,000 people.
3 December 2020 John Colville He fertilizes a phrase or a line of poetry for weeks and then gives birth to it in a speech.
3 December 2020 Chrisette Michele I have epiphanies all the time, because I’m always thinking. I’m a thinker. I’m always writing poetry, I’m always coming to conclusions.
3 December 2020 Andrew Motion More people are reading poetry now than at any time in the history of the human race.
3 December 2020 Stephen Colbert I wrote things for the school’s newspaper, and – like all teenagers – I dabbled in poetry.
3 December 2020 Abbas Kiarostami In the total darkness, poetry is still there, and it is there for you.
3 December 2020 Allen Ginsberg The only thing that can save the world is the reclaiming of the awareness of the world. That’s what poetry does.
3 December 2020 Richard Dawkins The Bible should be taught, but emphatically not as reality. It is fiction, myth, poetry, anything but reality. As such it needs to be taught because it underlies so much of our literature and our culture.
3 December 2020 Saul Williams I was always making up rhymes. But I never thought that poetry would become my life.
3 December 2020 Erik Satie The musician is perhaps the most modest of animals, but he is also the proudest. It is he who invented the sublime art of ruining poetry.
3 December 2020 Michael Graves I see architecture not as Gropius did, as a moral venture, as truth, but as invention, in the same way that poetry or music or painting is invention.
3 December 2020 Nigel Lythgoe I don’t think rap really fits in to ‘American Idol’ in the sense that I believe rap is an art form in itself more akin to poetry, more akin to drama, if you will.
3 December 2020 Amy Clampitt Women who are inclined to write poetry at all are inspired by being mad at something.
3 December 2020 Gilbert Murray The higher Greek poetry did not make up fictitious plots its business was to express the heroic saga, the myths.
3 December 2020 Philip Levine The irony is, going to work every day became the subject of probably my best poetry.
3 December 2020 A. R. Ammons I am grateful for – though I can’t keep up with – the flood of articles, theses, and textbooks that mean to share insight concerning the nature of poetry.
3 December 2020 Carl Sandburg When I was writing pretty poor poetry, this girl with midnight black hair told me to go on.
3 December 2020 Marguerite Young I’m as much influenced by Joseph Smith and the Mormons as I am, more so, than by Eliot. Actually, I’m much more influenced by the poetry of the Mormons.
3 December 2020 Mark Strand I would say that American poetry has always been a poetry of personal testimony.
