One difference between poetry and lyrics is that lyrics sort of fade into the background. They fade on the page and live on the stage when set to music.

Poetry is not an expression of the party line. It's that time of night lying in bed thinking what you really think making the private world public that's what the poet does.

I always wrote poetry and stuff like that so putting songs together wasn't that spectacular.

You know people speak in poetry all the time. They just don't realize it.

You know bad poetry I wrote in high school can still be found on the Internet and you know there's a Web log of our college newspaper. You know there's so many different stages of my creative development are sort of on-record if somebody were to choose to look for them.

Poetry is what we turn to in the most emotional moments of our life - when a beloved friend dies when a baby is born or when we fall in love.

I've written for every medium except poetry at which I suck.

I find a lot of poetry to be narcissistic.

I gave up on new poetry myself 30 years ago when most of it began to read like coded messages passing between lonely aliens in a hostile world.

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.

Poetry is what Milton saw when he went blind.

Romance like a ghost escapes touching it is always where you are not not where you are. The interview or conversation was prose at the time but it is poetry in the memory.

Art: If the object of poetry is to make men then poetry is the heir of prophecy.

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.

Poetry remembers that it was an oral art before it was a written art.

In poetry everything which must be said is almost impossible to say well.

I have written some songs but I would really call what I've done poetry at the end of the day because I'll sit with my guitar for hours and hours on end for like a week and then I won't touch it for a month. I also just have no confidence. And you know what? I don't have time because I'd rather be doing other things like knitting.

When you're going through something whether it's a wonderful thing like having a child or a sad thing like losing somebody you often feel like 'Oh my God I'm so overwhelmed I'm dealing with this huge thing on my own.' In fact poetry's a nice reminder that no everybody goes through it. These are universal experiences.

I was a 16-year-old girl at one point so of course I wrote poetry.

The poetry of a people comes from the deep recesses of the unconscious the irrational and the collective body of our ancestral memories.

Well I still write poetry but I wouldn't call myself a poet.

Poetry involves the mysteries of the irrational perceived through rational words.

I want to branch out. I want to write. I write poetry. I want to see my children grow up well.

Those who have never entered upon scientific pursuits know not a tithe of the poetry by which they are surrounded.