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" I wrote some of the worst poetry west from the Mississippi River, but I wrote. And I finally sometimes got it right. "

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" Poetry is language at its most distilled and most powerful. "

" Poetry is a beautiful way of spoiling prose, and the laborious art of exchanging plain sense for harmony. "

" Poetry is all that is worth remembering in life. "

William Hazlitt

" I started writing poetry as a teenager in suburban Chicago out of emotional desperation. "

" I think that the job of poetry, its political job, is to refresh the idea of justice, which is going dead in us all the time. "

" Every single soul is a poem. "

" It's so tedious writing cookbooks or writing the recipes because I've never been much of a measurer. But to write a book, you have to measure everything. "

" When truth has no burning, then it is philosophy, when it gets burning from the heart, it becomes poetry. "

" 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. "

" Poetry from the bottom up is an act of selection: you kind of feel your way through the crowds of poems. The good ones came forward a long time ago, and the bad ones fell away. "

" There are better ways we can transform this virulent hatred - by living our ideals, the Peace Corps, exchange students, teachers, exporting our music, poetry, blue jeans. "

" My mission in life is not merely to survive, but to thrive; and to do so with some passion, some compassion, some humor, and some style. "

" Traditional matter must be glorified, since it would be easier to listen to the re-creation of familiar stories than to quite new and unexpected things; the listeners, we must remember, needed poetry chiefly as the re-creation of tired hours. "

Lascelles Abercrombie

" Not too many people know it, but when I was in junior high, I was a pretty tough kid and was the leader of a street gang. Well, OK, it was less a street gang than an Ecology Club. We were pretty intimidating, though, and had our own meeting room until we got run out of there by a bunch of thugs from the Poetry Society. "

W. Bruce Cameron

" I think that one possible definition of our modern culture is that it is one in which nine-tenths of our intellectuals can't read any poetry. "

Randall Jarrell

" I'm not really a musician. I'm a performer, and I love rock n' roll. I've embraced rock n' roll because it encompasses all the things I'm interested in: poetry, revolution, sexuality, political activism - all of these things can be found in rock n' roll. "

" It is a no-fail, incontrovertible reality: If you get, give. If you learn, teach. You can't do anything with that except do it. "

" The thing about great poetry is we have no defenses against it. "

" I love Sufism as I love beautiful poetry, but it is not the answer. Sufism is like a mirage in the desert. It says to you, come and sit, relax and enjoy yourself for a while. "

" One of the wonderful things about Oprah: She teaches you to keep on stepping. "

" What are the sources of poetry? Love and death and the paradox of love and death. All poetry from the beginning is about Eros and Thanatos. Those are the only subjects. And how Eros and Thanatos interweave. "

" I'm conscious of a series of circles working its way through my life. And at this particular moment I have come round to the beginning of my writing cycle. It begins with poetry. There's hardly a day that goes past on which I don't write poetry. "

" It is impossible to struggle for civil rights, equal rights for blacks, without including whites. Because equal rights, fair play, justice, are all like the air: we all have it, or none of us has it. That is the truth of it. "

" Children can write poetry and then, unless they're poets, they stop when reach puberty. "

" It's one of the greatest gifts you can give yourself, to forgive. Forgive everybody. "

" 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. "

" Daydreaming is one of the key sources of poetry - a poem often starts as a daydream that finds its way into language - and walking seems to bring a different sort of alertness, an associative kind of thinking, a drifting state of mind. "

" All great achievements require time. "

" And yet, in a culture like ours, which is given to material comforts, and addicted to forms of entertainment that offer immediate gratification, it is surprising that so much poetry is written. "

" 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