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" I read as much poetry as time allows and circumstance dictates: No heartache can pass without a little Dorothy Parker, no thunderstorm without W. H. Auden, no sleepless night without W. B. Yeats. "

J. Courtney Sullivan

Poetry

Time

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" A glimpse at my night stand gives the mostly true impression that I am a book hoarder. "

" I credit poetry for making this space-walk possible. "

" One night, I lay awake for hours, just terrified. When the dawn finally came up - the comfortable blue sky, the familiar world returning - I could think of no other way to express my relief than through poetry. I made a decision there and then that it was what I wanted to do. Every time I pulled a wishbone, it was what I asked for. "

" There are still many tribal cultures where poetry and song, there is just one word for them. There are other cultures with literacy where poetry and song are distinguished. But poetry always remembers that it has its origins in music. "

" I always credited my mother with inspiring me to be a writer because she was such a passionate reader. She read poetry to me as a child. But rather late in life, I've come to appreciate my father, the accountant. He was a solid, organized, get-the-job-done kind of person-and you need that piece of it to be a writer, too. "

" Poetry is as precise a thing as geometry. "

" I certainly derived my skills as a prose writer from my scrutiny of poetry and of the individual word. But schools don't do things like that anymore - tracking words down to their roots. "

" I think the first time I really heard poetry was in the schoolyard. Just the little limericks that kids say when they're jumping rope and playing games. I think that's the first time I heard rhyming words - I don't know if I'd call that the definitive poetry, but that's when I heard rhyming words said and not necessarily sung. "

" I didn't want to deal in poetry. I got rid of that after a few months. "

" Today the U.S. is farther from being nourished by poetry than it was a hundred years ago, when books of poems were best-sellers. "

" Often I find that poems predict what I'm going to do later in my own writing, and often I find that poems predict my life. So I think poetry is the most intense expression of feeling that we have. "

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

" Poetry is not Irish or any other nationality; and when writers such as Messrs. Clarke, Farren and the late F. R. Higgins pursue Irishness as a poetic end, they are merely exploiting incidental local colour. "

" When Auden said his poetry didn't save one Jew from the gas chamber, he'd said it all. "

" I consider myself a poet first and a musician second. I live like a poet and I'll die like a poet. "

" There are men who can write poetry, and there are men who can read balance sheets. The men who can read balance sheets cannot write. "

" Don't call my lyrics poetry. It's an insult to real poets. "

" Poetry is about the grief. Politics is about the grievance. "

" My dream is that people will find a way back home, into their bodies, to connect with the earth, to connect with each other, to connect with the poor, to connect with the broken, to connect with the needy, to connect with people calling out all around us, to connect with the beauty, poetry, the wildness. "

" If the object of poetry is, to make men, then poetry is the heir of prophecy. "

" Poetry lies its way to the truth. "

" Poetry is a political act because it involves telling the truth. "

" If you have so earth-creeping a mind that it cannot lift itself up to look to the sky of poetry... thus much curse I must send you, in the behalf of all poets, that while you live, you live in love, and never get favour for lacking skill of a sonnet; and, when you die, your memory die from the earth for want of an epitaph. "

" My first spoken word poem, packed with all the wisdom of a 14-year-old, was about the injustice of being seen as unfeminine. The poem was very indignant, and mainly exaggerated, but the only spoken word poetry that I had seen up until that point was mainly indignant, so I thought that that's what was expected of me. "

" In poetry, everything can be faked but the intensity of utterance. "

" Look at Allen Ginsberg. In poems like 'Kaddish' and 'Howl,' you can hear a cantor between the lines. It's fully alive, and I think that's what's missing in modern poetry. It's too dry and cerebral. "

" Rap is poetry to music, like beatniks without beards and bongos. "

" I think music is poetry in the sense that I think the condition of poetry I'm going for has some qualities of music that it aspires to. "

" When you write, it's just a much more crystalline, compressed version of the voice you think with - though not the one you speak with. I think your writing voice is your laser-guided missile. It's the poetry part of you. "

" Learn poetry by heart. If you know a poem by heart, no one can take it away from you, and you can take advantage of it anytime. "