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" Often people, when they're confronted with a poem, it's like someone who keep saying 'what is the meaning of this? What is the meaning of this?' And that dulls us to the other pleasures poetry offers. "

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" I never really liked poetry readings; I liked to read poetry by myself, but I liked singing, chanting my lyrics to this jazz group. "

Leonard Cohen

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Singing

Poetry

" Sometimes poetry, it is incomprehensible. But we need incomprehensible stuff! It is very healthy to talk about incomprehensible things! It is very healthy! We need it! "

" Poetry is the one place where people can speak their original human mind. It is the outlet for people to say in public what is known in private. "

" I find in my poetry and prose the rhythms and imagery of the best - I mean, when I'm at my best - of the good Southern black preachers. The lyricism of the spirituals and the directness of gospel songs and the mystery of blues are in my music or in my poetry and prose, or I missed everything. "

" The quietest poetry can be an explosion of joy. "

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

" The completely solitary self: that's where poetry comes from, and it gets isolated by crisis, and those crises are often very intimate also. "

" Poetry is a domestic art, most itself when most at home. "

" It was through poetry I learned just to appreciate my own voice and to not think of my voice in terms of what it needs to be able to do, but what it can do. "

" Everyone needs solitude, especially a person who is used to thinking about what she experiences. Solitude is very important in my work as a mode of inspiration, but isolation is not good in this respect. I am not writing poetry about isolation. "

" Poetry is, first and last, language - the rest is filler. "

" I write plays and poetry at the same time, and I'm always refining, but I'm not obsessive about it. It's what I like to do, what I've always wanted to do. "

" There's never been a culture without poetry in the history of the world. "

" Rap and spoken word have reawakened the country to poetry in itself. Texting and Twitter encourage creative uses of casual language, in ways I have celebrated widely. But we've fallen behind on savoring the formal layer of our language. "

" The greatest thing a human soul ever does in this world... to see clearly is poetry, prophecy and religion all in one. "

" 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. "

" I sometimes wish I had been educated a Catholic, in order to unite the poetry of religion with its higher principles. Are they necessarily inseparable? Is man really so much of a philosopher, that he can conceive of truth in its abstract purity, and divest life and the affections of all the aids of the imagination? "

James Fenimore Cooper

Life

Imagination

Religion

" One will never again look at a birch tree, after the Robert Frost poem, in exactly the same way. "

" America was based on a poetic vision. What will happen when it loses its poetry? "

" In the world of poetry there are would-be poets, workshop poets, promising poets, lovesick poets, university poets, and a few real poets. "

" Journalism wishes to tell what it is that has happened everywhere as though the same things had happened for every man. Poetry wishes to say what it is like for any man to be himself in the presence of a particular occurrence as though only he were alone there. "

" Listen, real poetry doesn't say anything; it just ticks off the possibilities. Opens all doors. You can walk through any one that suits you. "

" The public is probably more suspicious of poets than women, and maybe for good reason. "

Billy Collins

Women

Public

" I learned snails don't have ears. They live in silence. They go slowly. Slowly, slowly in silence. "

Billy Collins

Learned

Silence

" The reason why we do maths is because it's like poetry. It's about patterns, and that really turned me on. It made me feel that maths was in tune with the other things I liked doing. "

" 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. "

" For an American, there's no automatic place where people love the art of poetry. There's not a social class that considers poetry its property the way in some countries there's a snob value to the art. "

" I think it comes from really liking literary forms. Poetry is very beautiful, but the space on the page can be as affecting as where the text is. Like when Miles Davis doesn't play, it has a poignancy to it. "

" Poetry is the lifeblood of rebellion, revolution, and the raising of consciousness. "

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

F. Sionil Jose

Peasant

Poetry