Get QuoteDark Inspirational Quotes App

" Poetry is a matter of life, not just a matter of language. "

Lucille Clifton

Related Quotes:

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

" I wrote poetry, which got me into lyrics. Stevie Wonder, Carole King, Elton John pulled me into pop. I started singing with a band - just for fun - when I was 17. And pretty soon, I was thinking I could sing pop in English as well as Spanish. "

" What's the function of poetry? It's to express general truths, to connect with the reader and make him think: 'Wow, I've experienced that, but you've expressed it so much better.' "

" From my teenage years on, I sought out Native elders from many tribal nations and listened to their words. I also started a small press, The Greenfield Review Press, and became very involved with publishing the work of other American Indian authors, especially books of poetry. "

" I like to borrow forms and quotes and use a lot of allusions, in both poetry and music. "

" Everything one invents is true, you may be perfectly sure of that. Poetry is as precise as geometry. "

Gustave Flaubert

" When you write, it's just a much more crystalline, compressed version of the voice you think with - though not the one you speak with. I think your writing voice is your laser-guided missile. It's the poetry part of you. "

Douglas Coupland

" I accept all interpretations of my films. The only reality is before the camera. Each film I make is kind of a return to poetry for me, or at least an attempt to create a poem. "

Bernardo Bertolucci

" In all my work, in the movies I write, the lyrics, the poetry, the prose, the essays, I am saying that we may encounter many defeats - maybe it's imperative that we encounter the defeats - but we are much stronger than we appear to be and maybe much better than we allow ourselves to be. Human beings are more alike than unalike. "

" I think poetry is best read to oneself. "

Rickie Lee Jones

" Maya Angelou was the voice of three generations. Her poetry spanned our journey, chronicled our hearts and documented our struggles as we moved from the orations of Martin Luther King to the presidency of Barack Obama. "

" In poetry, I have, since very young, loved poetry in translation. The Chinese, the French, the Russians, Italians, Indians and early Celts: the formality of the translator's voice, their measured breath and anxiety moves me as it lingers over the original. "

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

Robert Fitzgerald

" Nothing is too small. Nothing is too, quote-unquote, ordinary or insignificant. Those are the things that make up the measure of our days, and they're the things that sustain us. And they're the things that certainly can become worthy of poetry. "

" All bad poetry springs from genuine feeling. "

" 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. "

" Poetry is always slightly mysterious, and you wonder what is your relationship to it. "

" Poetry, even when apparently most fantastic, is always a revolt against artifice, a revolt, in a sense, against actuality. "

" However, I learned something. I thought that if the young person, the student, has poetry in him or her, to offer them help is like offering a propeller to a bird. "

" Mathematics is, as it were, a sensuous logic, and relates to philosophy as do the arts, music, and plastic art to poetry. "

Karl Wilhelm Friedrich Schlegel

" Dylan Thomas is now as much a case history as a chapter in the history of poetry. "

" I went to school in California, at Stanford when I was seventeen, and I lived in San Francisco until I was twenty-three, and then I lived in Hungary for, like, a summer, and then I went to Iowa for three years. At Iowa, I actually did the fiction program, not poetry. I was a fiction writer for a long time before I was 'out' as a poet. "

" Poetry is not an issue of form and enjambments. Poetry, as the word is classically used, has to do with sound and sense. It can be rhyme. It can be rhythm, pace, breath. "

" The sense of flowing, which is so crucial to song, is also crucial to poetry. "

" It's always a combination of physics and poetry that I find inspiring. It's hard to wrap your head around things like the Hubble scope. "

" There was no market for poetry about trauma, abuse, loss, love, and healing through the lens of a Punjabi-Sikh immigrant woman. "

" Poetry is the revelation of a feeling that the poet believes to be interior and personal which the reader recognizes as his own. "

Salvatore Quasimodo

" For me, prose walks, poetry dances. "

James Broughton

" 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. "

" Before people complain of the obscurity of modern poetry, they should first examine their consciences and ask themselves with how many people and on how many occasions they have genuinely and profoundly shared some experience with another. "