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" I saw the gooseflesh on my skin. I did not know what made it. I was not cold. Had a ghost passed over? No, it was the poetry. "

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" In fact a lot of them I think are absolute baloney. Those Charles Olsens and people like that. At first I was interested in seeing what they were up to, what they were doing, why they were doing it. They never moved me in the way that one is moved by true poetry. "

" 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. "

Wallace Stevens

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

" We explore our environment, more than we are compelled to utter poetry, when we're toddlers. We start doing that later. Before that happens, every child is a scientist. "

Neil deGrasse Tyson

" I know some people might think it odd - unworthy even - for me to have written a cookbook, but I make no apologies. The U.S. poet laureate Billy Collins thought I had demeaned myself by writing poetry for Hallmark Cards, but I am the people's poet so I write for the people. "

" 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. "

" San Diego shaped me a lot. The visual landscapes, the emotional panoramas, the teachers and mentors I had from the third grade through San Diego High - it's all a big part of the poetry fountain that I continue to drink from. "

Juan Felipe Herrera

" I have the choice of being constantly active and happy or introspectively passive and sad. "

" A novel is a work of poetry. In order to write it, one must have tranquility of spirit and of impression. "

Fyodor Dostoevsky

" There is something about poetry beyond prose logic, there is mystery in it, not to be explained but admired. "

" How can any one paint who cannot grade colors? How can any one write poetry who has not learnt to hear and see? "

Maria Montessori

" I can't understand Urdu, Bahasa or Russian, but when the Pakistani Faiz, the Indonesian Rendra and the Russian Rosdentvensky declaim, I can feel the living throb of rhythm and music, the warmth and passion of their poetry, as do the hundreds, not a mere roomful, of poetry lovers in the audience. "

" I've read a lot of war writing, even World War I writing, the British war poetry of Wilfred Owen and Siegfried Sassoon, Robert Graves's memoir 'Goodbye to All That,' and a civilian memoir, 'Testament of Youth,' by Vera Brittain. "

" Believe in some beneficent force beyond your own limited self. God, god, god: where are you? I want you, need you: the belief in you and love and mankind. "

" There's a certain line between jokes and music and poetry that's a bit blurred in my mind. "

" It's always good when women win things in fiction because it tends to be more male-dominated, unlike poetry, which is more equal. "

Carol Ann Duffy

" Reading a piece of poetry with no beat in front of 20 people is way more challenging than rocking for 10,000 people. "

" If poetry and the arts do anything, they can fortify your inner life, your inwardness. "

" Poetry should surprise by a fine excess and not by singularity, it should strike the reader as a wording of his own highest thoughts, and appear almost a remembrance. "

" Poetry and lyrics are very similar. Making words bounce off a page. "

" Arrogant, I think I have written lines which qualify me to be The Poetess of America (as Ted will be The Poet of England and her dominions). "

" 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. "

James Broughton

" I sometimes talk about the making of a poem within the poem. "

" I cannot speak for more than an hour exclusively about poetry. At that point, life itself takes over again. "

Wislawa Szymborska

" There is poetry as soon as we realize that we possess nothing. "

" Of course a poem is a two-way street. No poem is any good if it doesn't suggest to the reader things from his own mind and recollection that he will read into it, and will add to what the poet has suggested. But I do think poetry readings are very important. "

" 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. "

" Every American poet feels that the whole responsibility for contemporary poetry has fallen upon his shoulders, that he is a literary aristocracy of one. "

" Poetry is when an emotion has found its thought and the thought has found words. "

" On a summer night it can be lovely to sit around outside with friends after dinner and, yes, read poetry to each other. Keats and Yeats will never let you down, but it's differently exciting to read the work of poets who are still walking around out there. "

Michael Cunningham