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.

In medicine as well as in romantic poetry, it is the heart that is the center and controlling mechanics of life. If the heart stops, life stops. The loss of sight doesn't not mean death. Yet for ages, the eyes was believed to contain a human being's vital essence - a not wholly irrational belief.

Clarity, clarity, surely clarity is the most beautiful thing in the world, A limited, limiting clarity I have not and never did have any motive of poetry But to achieve clarity.

I find in my poetry and prose the rhythms and imagery of the best - I mean, when I'm at my best - of the good Southern black preachers. The lyricism of the spirituals and the directness of gospel songs and the mystery of blues are in my music or in my poetry and prose, or I missed everything.

Rather than numbing or drowning out the difficult-to-describe but urgently sensed feelings that are part of being human, poetry invites us to tease them out, to draw them into language that is rooted in intricate thought and strange impulse.

True poetry is similar to certain pictures whose owner is unknown and which only a few initiated people know.

Poetry is what we do to break bread with the dead.

I go to the gym, do some martial arts, and I love poetry. I have a tattoo of my family crest, and another on my back that says 'The Road Not Taken,' which is a poem by Robert Frost.

Poetry, whatever the manifest content of the poem, is always a violation of the rationalism and morality of bourgeois society.

And the second question, can poetry be taught? I didn't think so.

Poetry, especially traditional Iranian poetry, is very good at looking at things from a number of different angles simultaneously.

I think the term poet is a very exalted term and should be applied to a man at the end of his work. When he looks back over the body of his work and he's written poetry then let the verdict be that he's a poet.

Prose talks and poetry sings.

I'm a great believer in poetry out of the classroom, in public places, on subways, trains, on cocktail napkins. I'd rather have my poems on the subway than around the seminar table at an MFA program.

I wrote some bad poetry that I published in North African journals, but even as I withdrew into this reading, I also led the life of a kind of young hooligan.

A lot of people think, 'I'll give acting or poetry or filmmaking a try. And if it doesn't work out I'll go get a law degree, do something else that's more practical.' For me I went the reverse way. I lived the back-up plan.

I'm no longer religious, but the Bible fascinates me. Hardly anyone reads it anymore, but it's got everything: it's a book of poetry, it's a book of principle, it's a book of stories, and of myths and of epic tales, a book of histories and a book of fictions, of riddles, fables, parables and allegories.

I see poetry as spiritual medicine.

Poetry is all nouns and verbs.

I like art; if I could just draw pictures all day, I would, but I can't; I'm horrible. I practiced at it, still didn't get better - gave it up. I'm good with words, though, so I write music, poetry; sometimes I just journal in my phone.

I really disliked Philadelphia society - really, deeply disliked it. I spent a lot of my teenage years writing poetry attacking it.

She was the Judy Garland of American poetry.

The end of poetry is not to create a physical condition which shall give pleasure to the mind... The end of poetry is not an after-effect, not a pleasurable memory of itself, but an immediate, constant and even unpleasant insistence upon itself.

It is certain that at certain times talent entirely overcomes thought or poetry.