Get QuoteDark Inspirational Quotes App

" Each book should be an entity unto itself, with its own structure, character, life, name. "

Related Quotes:

" Writing poetry is such an intense experience that it helps to start the process in a casual or wayward frame of mind. "

" When I taught at the University of Houston in the Creative Writing program, we required the poets to take workshops in fiction writing, and we required the fiction writers to take workshops in poetry. "

" A person who's only suffering can't write a poem. There are choices to be made, and you need to be objective. "

" In every culture, in every language, there is expressive play, expressive word play; there's language use to different purposes that we would call poetry. "

" Poetry takes courage because you have to face things and you try to articulate how you feel. "

" Someone who's awake in the middle of the night is a soul consciousness when everyone else is asleep, and that creates a feeling of solitude in poetry that I very much like. "

" There have always been great defenses of poetry, and I've tried to write mine, and I think all of my work and criticism is a defense of poetry to try and keep something alive in poetry. "

" I've been fascinated over the years by the way refrains work. Think, say, of the refrains in Yeats' ballads. Ideally, each time the refrain comes back in a poem, it is both the same and different. It works by counterpoint and reiteration. It accrues meaning. "

" As far as I'm concerned, freedom is the most important thing to creativity. You should feel free to write in whatever way, whatever language, feels comfortable to you. "

" Life has to have the plenitude of art. "

" I grew up in a middle-class house without books, without art. No one around me wrote poetry or even read it. "

" When I was young, I wrote everything, and I thought I would be an all around writer, that I would write everything. "

" You're shadowed by your own dream, especially as you get older, of trying to create something that will last in poetry. And so, you're working on its behalf. "

" The commitment to working at poetry is important because a poet is a maker, and a poem is a made thing. We have to honor our feelings by working to transform them into something meaningful and lasting. "

" Poems mesmerized me, and I felt better when I was writing them, or trying to - more in touch with something deep and dark within myself. "

" I'm a poet, and I spent my life in poetry. "

" I began to imitate what I was reading, and I started to become a poet, even though what I was writing were not good poems. "

" Poets have always celebrated grief as one of the deepest human emotions. "

" It's very important to me to be an American poet, a Jewish poet, a poet who came of age in the 1960s. "

" My cultural experiences were as important to my formation as many of the other things that happened to me. "

" Throughout his work, Philip Levine's most powerful commitment has been to the failed and lost, the marginal, the unloved, the unwanted. "

" Poetry is meant to inspire readers and listeners, to connect them more deeply to themselves even as it links them more fully to others. But many people feel put off by the terms of poetry, its odd vocabulary, its notorious difficulty. "

" One of the things that happens to everyone who is grief-stricken, who has lost someone, is there comes a time when everyone else just wants you to get over it, but of course you don't get over it. You get stronger; you try and live on; you endure; you change; but you don't get over it. You carry it with you. "

" When poetry separates from song, then the words have to carry all the rhythm themselves; they have to do all the work. They can't rely on the singing voice. "

" Anyone who has lost a child will tell you that they don't recover their sense of endless possibility. Some people hide that well. But after a certain age, almost everyone is carrying something like that around, I suppose. "

" Poetry is a form of necessary speech... I have sought to restore the aura of sacred practice that accompanies true poetic creation, to honor both the rational and the irrational elements of poetry. "

" There's never been a culture without poetry in the history of the world. "

" The very good thing about MFA programs is their democratizing. They bring a lot of different people to the table. "

Different People

" It's absolutely crucial to maintain my life as a poet. "

" The idea that a poem was a made thing stayed with me, and I decided then that I wanted to be an artist, not just a diarist. So I put myself through a kind of apprenticeship in writing poetry, and I understood even then that my practice as a poet was deeply related to my reading. "