People, in relation to each other and their environments, can unwittingly create moments of poetry.

You're my beginning, my story, my poetry, and my Inspirational. You instilled life's purpose and mission in my heart. You're my beloved mother.

I hunched under that table wondering how I got to this point. Wasn't I supposed to be a writer, rubbing elbows at poetry conferences with Mary Ruefle and Kim Addonizio? Wasn't I supposed to be spending these late spring months at retreats wearing woven island commune hippie clothes designed by women named Star? Having Evan changed all that. This was a direction I never expected. This is supposed to be the meantime-teaching in a public school so that I could make money, get my graduate degrees, and move on to my real calling. The one where I learn, create, and pub- lish. The one where I'm not huddled under standard issue cafeteria tables contemplating the best place to run when gunfire broke out. The one where somebody else is responsible for the welfare of these children surrounding me. The one where I don't give a shit.

Your personal geography is a wellspring of memoir and poetry, and a source of authentic detail for fiction.

His (Samuel Coleridge) dark senses were constantly in play, the frustration of them bringing illness. Weather and organic nature combined in a synaesthetic multi-media event, and this was the ground of all perception before it was divded up in daily living: the Primary Imagination giving way to the Secondary. Poetry was forever seeking a conscious return to this state, which existed all the time, whether he knew it or not.

"We are, all of us, exploring a world none of us understands...searching for a more immediate, ecstatic, and penetrating mode of living...for the integrity, the courage to be whole, living in relation to one another in the full poetry of existence. The struggle for an integrated life existing in an atmosphere of communal trust and respect is one with desperately important political and social consequences...Fear is always with us, but we just don't have time for it.

I decided that it was not wisdom that enabled [poets] to write their poetry, but a kind of instinct or Inspirational, such as you find in seers and prophets who deliver all their sublime messages without knowing in the least what they mean.

We speak in (rich) monotones. Our poetry is haunted by the music it has left behind. Orpheus shrinks to a poet when he looks back, with the impatience of reason, on a music stronger than death.

She dotes on poetry, sir. She adores it; I may say that her whole soul and mind are wound up, and entwined with it. She has produced some delightful pieces, herself, sir. You may have met with her 'Ode to an Expiring Frog,' sir.

You campaign in poetry. You govern in prose.

I have defined poetry as a 'passionate pursuit of the Real.

Historical sense and poetic sense should not, in the end, be contradictory, for if poetry is the little myth we make, history is the big myth we live, and in our living, constantly remake.

"There's a book of poetry

Music, when combined with a pleasurable idea, is poetry; music, without the idea, is simply music; the idea, without the music, is prose, from its very definitiveness.

Poetry is as necessary to comprehension as science. It is as impossible to live without reverence as it is without joy.

We may feel bitterly how little our poems can do in the face of seemingly out of control technological power and seemingly limitless corporate greed, yet it has always been true that poetry can break isolation, show us to ourselves when we are outlawed or made invisible, remind us of beauty where no beauty seems possible, remind us kinship where all is represented as separation.

Aristocracy naturally leads the human mind to the contemplation of the past, and fixes it there. Democracy, on the contrary, gives men a sort of instinctive distaste for what is ancient. In this respect aristocracy is far more favorable to poetry; for things commonly grow larger and more obscure as they are more remote; and, for this two-fold reason, they are better suited to the delineation of the ideal.

"Poetry ought to be a by-product of living, and you can't have a by-product unless you've got a product

In the very essence of poetry there is something indecent; A thing brought forth that we didn't know we had in us, So we blink our eyes, as if a tiger had sprung out And stood in the light, licking its tail.

If I feel physically as if the top of my head were taken off, I know that is poetry.

I do not write poetry; I take words and dip them in feelings.

"She's always looking for poetry and passion and sensitivity, the whole Romantic kitchen. I live on a rather simpler diet.'

How they had dreamed together, he and she... how they had planned, and laughed, and loved. They had lived for a while in the very heart of poetry.

I have been used to consider poetry as the food of love.