“My films are an extension of my poetry, using the white screen like the white page to be filled with images.”
Topic
poetry
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“Poetry for me is as much a spiritual practice as sexual ecstasy is.”
“Poetry is the language we speak in the most terrifying or ecstatic passages of our lives. But the very word poetry scares people. They think of their grade school teachers reciting 'Hiawatha' and they groan.”
“I thought to spend my declining years writing poetry and teaching - but that won't pay the Bergdorf's bill. I think I'll move to somewhere life is cheaper.”
“You know, in my music career there was a moment where the irony was just so heavy. There were people in my audience that were the reason I developed neuroses. These people that tortured my life were using my art, my poetry, as fuel for them, to torture other people.”
“Poetry is adolescence fermented, and thus preserved.”
“Poetry and music are very good friends. Like mommies and daddies and strawberries and cream - they go together.”
“It's always a combination of physics and poetry that I find inspiring. It's hard to wrap your head around things like the Hubble scope.”
“Poetry lies its way to the truth.”
“If a poem is not memorable, there's probably something wrong. One of the problems of free verse is that much of the free verse poetry is not memorable.”
“Living here on Earth, we breathe the rhythms of a universe that extends infinitely above us. When resonant harmonies arise between this vast outer cosmos and the inner human cosmos, poetry is born.”
“There is something about poetry beyond prose logic, there is mystery in it, not to be explained but admired.”
“Colloquial poetry is to the real art as the barber's wax dummy is to sculpture.”
“Poetry is really a way of sharing feelings and ideas.”
“The biggest problem is people are afraid of poetry, think they can't understand it or that it will be boring.”
“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.”
“Rap is poetry set to music. But to me it's like a jackhammer.”
“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.”
“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.”
“In poetry, you must love the words, the ideas and the images and rhythms with all your capacity to love anything at all.”
“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.”
“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.”
“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.”
“Perhaps no person can be a poet, or even enjoy poetry, without a certain unsoundness of mind.”