Songs are all poetry, and they don't make any sense.
A. A. Gill
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
I could no more define poetry than a terrier can define a rat.
A. E. Housman
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.
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.
If a line of poetry strays into my memory, my skin bristles so that the razor ceases to act.
Poetry comes from the highest happiness or the deepest sorrow.
A. P. J. Abdul Kalam
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
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.'
Once every five hundred years or so, a summary statement about poetry comes along that we can't imagine ourselves living without.
Poetry leads us to the unstructured sources of our beings, to the unknown, and returns us to our rational, structured selves refreshed.
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.
Probably all the attention to poetry results in some value, though the attention is more often directed to lesser than to greater 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.
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.
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
I write poetry on my iPhone. I've got about 100 poems on there.
Aaron Neville
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.
In the total darkness, poetry is still there, and it is there for you.
Abbas Kiarostami
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.
I love to read poetry but I haven't written anything that I'm willing to show anybody.
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.
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.
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.
Most people ignore most poetry because most poetry ignores most people.
Stadium rock and commercial rock are the opposite of what poetry needs. An audience of around 200 is ideal for poetry.
Written poetry is different. Best thing is to see it in performance first, then read it. Performance is more provocative.
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.
The moment of change is the only poem.
Poetry is above all a concentration of the power of language, which is the power of our ultimate relationship to everything in the universe.
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.
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.
At twenty, I implicitly dissociated poetry from politics.
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.
Granted, I'm someone who loves words. I've always loved poetry - so it's suited to me.
Rap is rhythm and poetry. Hip-hop is storytelling and poetry as well.
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?'
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!
Pure mathematics is, in its way, the poetry of logical ideas.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
Each memorable verse of a true poet has two or three times the written content.
But it is the province of religion, of philosophy, of pure poetry only, to go beyond life, beyond time, into eternity.
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.
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.
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.
