I've never read a political poem that's accomplished anything. Poetry makes things happen but rarely what the poet wants.

A lot happens by accident in poetry.

Poetry is the exquisite expression of exquisite expressions.

In my late teenage years I developed a real passion for it and wrote a lot of poetry.

Poetry is like a bird it ignores all frontiers.

Poetry is always slightly mysterious and you wonder what is your relationship to it.

In fact in lyric poetry truthfulness becomes recognizable as a ring of truth within the medium itself.

A theology should be like poetry which takes us to the end of what words and thoughts can do.

The library was open for one hour after school let out. I hid there looking at art books and reading poetry.

Stylized acting and direction is to realistic acting and direction as poetry is to prose.

I was one of those dark quiet kids that wrote poetry.

Perhaps no person can be a poet or even enjoy poetry without a certain unsoundness of mind.

For my part if I consider poetry as an object I maintain that it is born of the necessity of adding a vocal sound (speech) to the hammering of the first tribal music.

When I was in college I used to write little ditties and short stories and poetry for my friends. Writing a book is another thing. It is so much different from my traditional day of dirty fingernails and greasy hair and hot pans.

If poetry should address itself to the same needs and aspirations the same hopes and fears to which the Bible addresses itself it might rival it in distribution.

In poetry you must love the words the ideas and the images and rhythms with all your capacity to love anything at all.

Most people read poetry listening for echoes because the echoes are familiar to them. They wade through it the way a boy wades through water feeling with his toes for the bottom: The echoes are the bottom.

With several different kinds of poetry to choose from a man would decide that he would like best to be an epic poet and he would set out in conscious determination on an epic poem.

Rap is poetry set to music. But to me it's like a jackhammer.

I've written poetry since I was in the first grade and it wasn't until I was a little bit older that I realized poetry could be put to music and become a song.

I never thought I'd be doing poetry books. I never really studied poetry. But the first one I did was after my mother died and I realized that people sort of think and talk about her style and fashion but in fact what made her the person she was was really her love of reading and ideas.

The biggest problem is people are afraid of poetry think they can't understand it or that it will be boring.

Poetry is really a way of sharing feelings and ideas.

Colloquial poetry is to the real art as the barber's wax dummy is to sculpture.