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

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" Often I find that poems predict what I'm going to do later in my own writing, and often I find that poems predict my life. So I think poetry is the most intense expression of feeling that we have. "

" Poetry always, always, always is a key piece of democracy. "

" Under adversity, under oppression, the words begin to fail, the easy words begin to fail. In order to convey things accurately, the human being is almost forced to find the most precise words possible, which is a precondition for literature. "

" The sources of poetry are in the spirit seeking completeness. "

Muriel Rukeyser

" I don't like to have a calm, orderly, quiet place to work. I often compose while driving, compose in my head. It is true that I wrote my little book, 'The Sounds of Poetry, A Brief Guide,' almost entirely in airplanes and airport departure lounges. "

" Poetry is an echo, asking a shadow to dance. "

" I was very interested in American poetry for many years. Much less now. "

" Poetry is a special use of language that opens onto the real. The business of the poet is truth telling, which is why in the Celtic tradition no one could be a teacher unless he or she was a poet. "

" Poetry is the record of the best and happiest moments of the happiest and best minds. "

Percy Bysshe Shelley

" Rhyme, that enslaved queen, that supreme charm of our poetry, that creator of our meter. "

" I enjoy listening to contemporary rock on the college stations while I'm taking long walks, love gospel and soul music, am fascinated by hip-hop and rap as the new kind of urban 'beat' poetry and, come to think of it, find something interesting about just any kind of music. "

" A lot of ancient poetry sees in nature a reflection of human emotions, and in a post-industrialized era, once people have become more aware of the necessity of a more harmonious relation between man and nature, we need to build cities which can connect with human spiritual needs instead of being merely functional. "

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

" I think reading Shakespeare's plays when I was young was extremely important. He had the ability to make utter strangers come alive. "

" I see poetry as spiritual medicine. "

Mahmoud Darwish

" Poetry remembers that it was an oral art before it was a written art. "

Jorge Luis Borges

" My poetry is me trying to reconcile my own life and opportunities I've had with opportunities my students aren't given and how profoundly unfair that is. "

" If poetry and the arts do anything, they can fortify your inner life, your inwardness. "

" Poetry consists in a rhyming dictionary and things seen. "

" 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 poetry of a people comes from the deep recesses of the unconscious, the irrational and the collective body of our ancestral memories. "

Margaret Walker

" I entered a poem in a poetry contest around 1987, and the poem won and I received $1,000 for it. That made me realize that maybe what I was writing was worth reading to people. After that, for some reason, I turned to novels and I've written mainly novels ever since. "

" 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. "

Wislawa Szymborska

" As I grew older - collapsing into my seventies, glimpsing ahead the cliffs of the eighties, colliding into eighty-five - poetry abandoned me. "

" I thought, after the Pulitzer, at least nothing will surprise me quite that much in my life. And another one happened. It was quite amazing. "

" I see a resurgence of interest in poetry. I am less optimistic about the prospects for the arts when it comes to federal funding. "

" Poetry is what gets lost in translation. "

" I don't think I've ever read poetry, ever. I'm not really book-smart. "

" Local images have one kind of reality. 'U.S. 1' will, I hope, have that kind and another, too. Poetry can extend the document. "

Muriel Rukeyser

" 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. "