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" Listeners are kind of ambushed... if a poem just happens to be said when they're listening to the radio. The listener doesn't have time to deploy what I call their 'poetry deflector shields' that were installed in high school - there's little time to resist the poem. "

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" Instead of trying to come up and pontificate on what literature is, you need to talk with children, to teachers, and make sure they get poetry in the curriculum early. "

Rita Dove

You

Teachers

Poetry

" I do not see how a man can work on the frontiers of physics and write poetry at the same time. They are in opposition. "

" Writing poetry makes you intensely conscious of how words sound, both aloud and inside the head of the reader. You learn the weight of words and how they sound to the ear. "

" Theater and poetry were what helped people stay alive and want to go on living. "

Vanessa Redgrave

Alive

Living

" A poem begins as a lump in the throat, a sense of wrong, a homesickness, a lovesickness. "

" I don't think anybody in my family meant there to be any pressure for me to write. But our parents were incredibly verbal and wrote for a living. The house was full of books, and we all grew up steeped in language. I mean, our mother recited poetry at the dinner table. "

" I'm a failed poet. Reading poetry helps me to see the world differently, and I try to infuse my prose with figurative language, which goes against the trend in fiction. "

" I was reading the dictionary. I thought it was a poem about everything. "

" All one's inventions are true, you can be sure of that. Poetry is as exact a science as geometry. "

" Eloquence is the poetry of prose. "

" I don't like to boast, but I have probably skipped more poetry than any other person of my age and weight in this country. "

" 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. "

" Poetry is at least an elegance and at most a revelation. "

" 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. "

" 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. "

" Poetry is meant to be heard. "

" How do poems grow? They grow out of your life. "

" I come from a short fiction background, and my mom is a poet, so I've always read poetry; I've always had a lot of different influences both linguistically and musically. "

" I grew up in this town, my poetry was born between the hill and the river, it took its voice from the rain, and like the timber, it steeped itself in the forests. "

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

" Poetry is necessary, but is the poet? "

Carlos Drummond de Andrade

Necessary

Poetry

Poet

" I aspire to a poetry of great formal integrity, deep passion and high intellect, and I have many models for how to do that. "

" We're all just animals. That's all we are, and everything else is just an elaborate justification of our instincts. That's where music comes from. And romantic poetry. And bad novels. "

" Poetry is not an expression of the party line. It's that time of night, lying in bed, thinking what you really think, making the private world public, that's what the poet does. "

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

" Poetry was one of the things that interested me most as I was growing up. I used to write it in my head all the time. I still think the very greatest pleasure in life is to write a poem. "

" I've been writing poetry seriously since about 2008, 2009. "

" The poetry that sustains me is when I feel that, for a minute, the clouds have parted and I've seen ecstasy or something. "

Rita Dove

Poetry

Seen

" I thought to spend my declining years writing poetry and teaching - but that won't pay the Bergdorf's bill. I think I'll move to somewhere life is cheaper. "

" Poetry was my 'in' to the idea that I could express myself through art. "