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" 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

People

Listening

Boy

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" We all write poems; it is simply that poets are the ones who write in words. "

" Perhaps it is of more value to infuriate philosophers than to go along with them. "

" You will find poetry nowhere unless you bring some of it with you. "

" I have written some poetry and two prose books about baseball, but if I had been a rich man, I probably would not have written many of the magazine essays that I have had to do. But, needing to write magazine essays to support myself, I looked to things that I cared about and wanted to write about, and certainly baseball was one of them. "

" The poem is not, as someone put it, deflective of entry. But the real question is, 'What happens to the reader once he or she gets inside the poem?' That's the real question for me, is getting the reader into the poem and then taking the reader somewhere, because I think of poetry as a kind of form of travel writing. "

" I have always written poetry but I have never applied it to songwriting. "

" As far as I am concerned, poetry is a statement concerning the human condition, composed in verse. "

" Poetry, I think, intensifies the reader's experience. If it's a humorous facet of the story, poetry makes it more exuberant. If it's a sad facet, poetry can make it more poignant. "

" To me, art begets art. Painting feeds the eye just as poetry feeds the ear, which is to say that both feed the soul. "

Susan Vreeland

Soul

Eye

" Everything is complicated; if that were not so, life and poetry and everything else would be a bore. "

" 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. "

" If a line of poetry strays into my memory, my skin bristles so that the razor ceases to act. "

" Even though I am the daughter of a poet, and my stepmother is also a poet, growing up, I didn't think I could understand poetry; I didn't think that it had any relevance to my life, the feelings that I endured on a day-to-day basis, until I was introduced to the right poem. "

" If there were no poetry on any day in the world, poetry would be invented that day. For there would be an intolerable hunger. "

" Poetry is one of the ancient arts, and it began as did all the fine arts, within the original wilderness of the earth. "

" The poetry and transgression that was so much of surrealism's anarchic force has been recruited into mainstream culture. It has been made commonplace by television and magazine merchandising, by computer games and Internet visuals, by film and MTV, by the fashion shoot. "

" I hardly remember how I started to write poetry. It's hard to imagine what I thought poetry could do. "

" I have not the slightest pretension to call my verses poetry; I write now and then for no other purpose than to relieve depression or to improve my English. "

" Poetic talent doesn't operate in a vacuum. There is a spirit of Polish poetry. "

" I always knew that was what I wanted to do - to write, particularly poetry. "

" So the best way to understand poetry, which is made by men, is to imitate, and that goes back to making work as a kind of doorway into new work, as opposed to making work as a mirror of the old work. "

" Sometimes poetry is inspired by the conversation entered into by reading other poems. "

" A public expectation, it has to be said, not of poetry as such but of political positions variously approvable by mutually disapproving groups. "

" In science one tries to tell people, in such a way as to be understood by everyone, something that no one ever knew before. But in poetry, it's the exact opposite. "

" The most beautiful thing in the world is, of course, the world itself. "

" 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. "

" As life grows more terrible, its literature grows more terrible. "

Wallace Stevens

Grows

Terrible

" 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. "

" Our bloom is gone. We are the fruit thereof. "

" I am for poetry that is admired by peasant and aristocrat alike. "

F. Sionil Jose

Peasant

Poetry