“I don't think you get to good writing unless you expose yourself and your feelings. Deep songs don't come from the surface they come from the deep down. The poetry and the songs that you are suppose to write, I believe are in your heart.”
Topic
poetry
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“A group of us started a community center in Santa Monica. We've tried different programs, and three have worked really well. A poetry group. Once a week we visit Venice High and talk to girls at risk.”
“Gil Thorpe is a great diversion and is to book writing as poetry is to prose.”
“The music just tends to be a vehicle for that poetry.”
“I have experienced healing through other writers' poetry, but there's no way I can sit down to write in the hope a poem will have healing potential. If I do, I'll write a bad poem.”
“When you translate poetry in particular, you're obliged to look at how the writer with whom you're working puts together words, sentences, phrases, the triple tension between the line of verse, the syntax and the sentence.”
“Poetry seems to have been eliminated as a literary genre, and installed instead, as a kind of spiritual aerobic exercise - nobody need read it, but anybody can do it.”
“An experienced reader uses the poem as an agent of inquiry. This makes poetry very exciting, unstable, and interactive.”
“Poetry is but another form of inquiry into the nature of phenomena, using with its own unique procedures and tools.”
“In the past, poetry came in the form of spells and chants used to effect change.”
“If poetry alters the way in which the reader views the world, then it has had its desired effect.”
“My obsession with time informs my poetry so completely it is hard for me to summarize it. We want time to pass, for new things to happen to us, we want to hold on to certain moments, we don't want our lives to end.”
“I can find some way to make poetry out of my life's experiences.”
“It is the timber of poetry that wears most surely, and there is no timber that has not strong roots among the clay and worms.”
“I think it comes from really liking literary forms. Poetry is very beautiful, but the space on the page can be as affecting as where the text is. Like when Miles Davis doesn't play, it has a poignancy to it.”
“If you go into a bar in most places in America and even say the word poetry, you'll probably get beaten up. But poetry is a really strong, beautiful form to me, and a lot of innovation in language comes from poetry.”
“I work on words, mostly, toward them being poetry or short stories, and then some of those become songs. They all find their place in the world, but they all start off in the same place. I'm always painting and drawing as well, and it's an ongoing creative assignment.”
“I was a visual artist primarily and a writer, even from a very young age. I wrote a lot of stories and poetry and... I had a desire to create always. And I always had a desire to show my work.”
“There is an urgent need for Americans to look deeply into themselves and their actions, and musical poetry is perhaps the most effective mirror available. Every newspaper headline is a potential song.”
“When I really want to be soothed and reminded of why people bother to fiddle with sentences, I often read poetry.”
“From my music training, I knew that, some Spanish rhythms apart, 5/4 is a time signature used only in the modern era. Holst's Mars from the Planets is 5/4. But if you speak lines of poetry in that pattern you just end up hitting the off-beats. It's only when you add a rest - a sixth beat - that it sounds as it surely should sound.”
“So I really began as a failed poet - although when I first wanted to be a writer, I learned to write prose by reading poetry.”
“I've always written, all my life, and when I was very young I developed an interest in poetry.”
“I like the way words go together and I like the gamesmanship of writing poetry. It is such a challenge.”