I want to gesture toward a poetry of ourselves and others under the conditions of twenty-first-century absolutism, making us dimensional in a time when the human concrete is continually erased by state and religious violence and by disingenuous jargon serving state power.

Adrienne Rich

Songs are all poetry, and they don't make any sense.

I was proud my father spoke Arabic fluently - his father sent him to learn Arabic from a sheikh - and we had Arab friends. His task of understanding the Arabs - not only politics but poetry - was very important; he took it as a vocation.

A. B. Yehoshua

Politics Poetry Vocation

I could no more define poetry than a terrier can define a rat.

A. E. Housman

Poetry Try Than

Experience has taught me, when I am shaving of a morning, to keep watch over my thoughts, because, if a line of poetry strays into my memory, my skin bristles so that the razor ceases to act.

A. E. Housman

Poetry Morning Experience

Even when poetry has a meaning, as it usually has, it may be inadvisable to draw it out... Perfect understanding will sometimes almost extinguish pleasure.

A. E. Housman

Time Poetry Will

If a line of poetry strays into my memory, my skin bristles so that the razor ceases to act.

A. E. Housman

Poetry Try T

Poetry comes from the highest happiness or the deepest sorrow.

A. P. J. Abdul Kalam

Poetry Happiness Try

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.

A. R. Ammons

Poetry Nature Art

If we ask a vague question, such as, 'What is poetry?' we expect a vague answer, such as, 'Poetry is the music of words,' or 'Poetry is the linguistic correction of disorder.'

A. R. Ammons

Poetry Music Words

Once every five hundred years or so, a summary statement about poetry comes along that we can't imagine ourselves living without.

A. R. Ammons

Poetry Men Years

Poetry leads us to the unstructured sources of our beings, to the unknown, and returns us to our rational, structured selves refreshed.

A. R. Ammons

Poetry Us Unknown

Besides the actual reading in class of many poems, I would suggest you do two things: first, while teaching everything you can and keeping free of it, teach that poetry is a mode of discourse that differs from logical exposition.

A. R. Ammons

Poetry You Would

Probably all the attention to poetry results in some value, though the attention is more often directed to lesser than to greater values.

A. R. Ammons

Poetry Great Values

The poet exposes himself to the risk. All that has been said about poetry, all that he has learned about poetry, is only a partial assurance.

A. R. Ammons

Poetry Art Try

That's a wonderful change that's taken place, and so most poetry today is published, if not directly by the person, certainly by the enterprise of the poet himself, working with his friends.

A. R. Ammons

Work Poetry Change

In high school, my English teacher Celeste McMenamin introduced me to the great novels and Shakespeare and taught me how to write. Essays, poetry, critical analysis. Writing is a skill that was painful then but a love of mine now.

Aaron Lazar

Teacher Poetry Men

I write poetry on my iPhone. I've got about 100 poems on there.

Aaron Neville

Poetry Write Try

So now I have a collection of poetry by Aaron Neville and I give it to people I want to share it with. I'd like to publish it someday.

Aaron Neville

Poetry Wit Want

In the total darkness, poetry is still there, and it is there for you.

Abbas Kiarostami

Poetry You Try

Poetry always runs away from you - it's very difficult to grasp it, and every time you read it, depending on your conditions, you will have a different grasp of it. Whereas with a novel, once you have read it, you have grasped it.

Abbas Kiarostami

Time Poetry Your

I love to read poetry but I haven't written anything that I'm willing to show anybody.

Abraham Verghese

What can a pencil do for all of us? Amazing things. It can write transcendent poetry, uplifting music, or life-changing equations; it can sketch the future, give life to untold beauty, and communicate the full-force of our love and aspirations.

Adam Braun

I love all kinds of music. My dad's from London, so he loves David Bowie, the Stones, The Clash. I grew up with that influence while loving poetry and loving all kinds of current music.

Adam Hicks

I think the poetry that came out of Belfast, and especially the Queen's University set, in the 1970s and '80s - you know, Paul Muldoon and Seamus Heaney, Derek Mahon and Ciaran Carson - that was probably the finest body of work since the Gaelic renaissance, up there with the work of Yeats and Synge and Lady Gregory.

Adrian McKinty

Most people ignore most poetry because most poetry ignores most people.

Adrian Mitchell

Stadium rock and commercial rock are the opposite of what poetry needs. An audience of around 200 is ideal for poetry.

Adrian Mitchell

Written poetry is different. Best thing is to see it in performance first, then read it. Performance is more provocative.

Adrian Mitchell

I use rock and jazz and blues rhythms because I love that music. I hope my poetry has a relationship with good-time rock'n roll.

Adrian Mitchell

At twenty, I implicitly dissociated poetry from politics.

Adrienne Rich

I want to gesture toward a poetry of ourselves and others under the conditions of twenty-first-century absolutism, making us dimensional in a time when the human concrete is continually erased by state and religious violence and by disingenuous jargon serving state power.

Adrienne Rich

Poetry can't give us the laws and institutions and representatives, the antidotes we need: only public activism by massive numbers of citizens can do that.

Adrienne Rich

Poetry is above all a concentration of the power of language, which is the power of our ultimate relationship to everything in the universe.

Adrienne Rich

The moment of change is the only poem.

Adrienne Rich

Whatever else anyone says he was, he may have been. But Tupac really was a great American artist. The passage of time allows us to see things as they really are: We see the poetry; we see the personality; we see different sides.

Afeni Shakur

Granted, I'm someone who loves words. I've always loved poetry - so it's suited to me.

Aimee Bender

Rap is rhythm and poetry. Hip-hop is storytelling and poetry as well.

Ajay Naidu

The claims I'm making for art are simply the claims that we naturally make around music or around poetry. We're much more relaxed around those art forms. We're willing to ask, 'How could this find a place in my heart?'

Alain de Botton

Romantic poetry had its heyday when people like Lord Byron were kicking it large. But you try and make a living as a poet today, and you'll find it's very different!

Alan Moore

Pure mathematics is, in its way, the poetry of logical ideas.

Albert Einstein

Probably when I was about 16 or 17 I started writing. I wouldn't call it poetry, even though I've referred to it as poetry a couple times. But I don't think that's right. It was more scribblings and stream of consciousness.

Aldous Harding

I am an artist, you understand? For me, a picture is like poetry. When you make art, this is not coming from an intellectual place. It's coming from the deep side of your unconscious, your soul.

Alejandro Jodorowsky

I am a writer, which means I write stories, I write novels, and I would write poetry if I knew how to. I don't want to limit myself.

Aleksandar Hemon

I didn't start writing songs, honestly, until I started making my album. I was always doing poetry, but I never thought I could write songs. I discouraged myself and thought it was so hard. But starting this process and learning just what it is to be a songwriter and performer taught me that you don't have to feel discouraged about anything.

Alessia Cara

I wrote poetry, journals, and, especially, plays for the neighborhood kids to perform. I had an ordinary, happy childhood. Nothing much was going on, but I had fun.

Alex Flinn

What I see in science is a lot of imagination referring to things that are fundamental to what we are. Our cells, our history, our future, our place in the universe, our lack of place in the universe. That's poetry as far as I'm concerned.

Alex Garland

Each memorable verse of a true poet has two or three times the written content.

Alfred de Musset

But it is the province of religion, of philosophy, of pure poetry only, to go beyond life, beyond time, into eternity.

Alfred de Vigny

I have not the slightest pretension to call my verses poetry; I write now and then for no other purpose than to relieve depression or to improve my English.

Alfred Nobel

I did literature at university, so I had a real relationship with poetry, but they don't make many films about the world of a poet.

Alice Eve

I believed in fictional characters as if they were a part of real life. Poetry was important, too. My parents had memorized poems from their days attending school in New York City and loved reciting them. We all enjoyed listening to these poems and to music as well.

Alice McDermott