Get QuoteDark Inspirational Quotes App

" Fresh or changing conditions ferment fresh forms. "

Related Quotes:

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

" A novel takes place over time. It's a historical narrative, and it needs to have a series of peaks and valleys and the move through. You can't just start at the highest pitch and stay there, but you can in a lyric poem. "

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

" I believe in rooting poems in actual places, even if you move into some other extraordinary realm. "

" The elegy does the work of mourning; it allows us to experience mortality. It turns loss into remembrance, and it delivers an inheritance. "

" I find great consolation in having a lot of poetry books around. I believe that writing poetry and reading it are deeply intertwined. I've always delighted in the company of the poets I've read. "

" Poetry is a vocation. It is not a career but a calling. "

" The idea of a poem as a message in a bottle means that it's sent out towards some future reader, and the reader who opens that bottle becomes the addressee of the literary text. "

" 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. "

" I love the leisurely amplitude, the spaciousness, of taking a walk, of heading somewhere, anywhere, on foot. I love the sheer adventure of it: setting out and taking off. "

" I still feel that I'm capable of being as emotionally present as when I was young. "

" 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. "

" I'm so happy to be an advocate for poetry. "

" 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. "

" 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. "

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

" The muse, the beloved, and duende are three ways of thinking of what is the source of poetry, and all three seem to me different names or different ways to think about something that is not entirely reasonable, not entirely subject to the will, not entirely rational. "

" I found a comfort in trying to solve some poetic problems because there were human ones I just couldn't solve. "

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

" Poetry itself hasn't been well served by poets who fled to the margins. "

" 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. "

" 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. "

" Once your poems are completed, you send them into the world. You don't write for a coterie of other writers - you write for other human beings. "

" Depression is a feeling without a cause. Mourning has a cause. "

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

" I read a lot as a kid and in high school. "

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

" 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. "

" I like the machinery of poems, especially when they have human warmth. "

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