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" Poetry is often the art of overhearing yourself say things you didn't know you knew. It is a learned skill to force yourself to articulate your life, your present world or your possibilities for the future. "

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" In the poetic tradition, the heart's affections are indeed holy, and if organizations are asking for people's hearts and minds, they are asking in a way for their holy and hidden affections at the same time. "

David Whyte

People

Minds

Heart

" The world is full of poetry. The air is living with its spirit; and the waves dance to the music of its melodies, and sparkle in its brightness. "

" I have a deep and ongoing love of Iceland, particular the landscape, and when writing 'Burial Rites,' I was constantly trying to see whether I could distill its extraordinary and ineffable qualities into a kind of poetry. "

" The terms of poetry - some simple, some complicated, some ancient, some new - should bring us closer to what we're hearing, enlarging our experience of it, enabling us to describe what we're reading, to feel and think with greater precision. "

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

" Making poetry with a camera - that's the essence of what I do. "

" For me, prose walks, poetry dances. "

James Broughton

Prose

Walks

" 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. "

" Now, to read poetry at all is to have an ideal anthology of one's own, and in that possession to be incapable of content with the anthologies of all the world besides. "

William Ernest Henley

World

Content

Ideal

" Nobody, I think, ought to read poetry, or look at pictures or statues, who cannot find a great deal more in them than the poet or artist has actually expressed. Their highest merit is suggestiveness. "

" Poetry is a form of necessary speech... I have sought to restore the aura of sacred practice that accompanies true poetic creation, to honor both the rational and the irrational elements of poetry. "

" So, poetry becomes a means for useful dialogue between people who are not only unknown, but mute to each other. It produces a dialogue among people that guards all of us against manipulation by our so-called leaders. "

June Jordan

Dialogue

People

" If your daily life seems poor, do not blame it; blame yourself that you are not poet enough to call forth its riches; for the Creator, there is no poverty. "

" A real conversation always contains an invitation. You are inviting another person to reveal herself or himself to you, to tell you who they are or what they want. "

" Poetry is more a threshold than a path. "

Seamus Heaney

Threshold

Poetry

" The next big push in my life is trying to get poetry popular again. "

" People want poetry. They need poetry. They get it. They don't want fancy work. "

" Poetry is ordinary language raised to the Nth power. Poetry is boned with ideas, nerved and blooded with emotions, all held together by the delicate, tough skin of words. "

" If I feel physically as if the top of my head were taken off, I know that is poetry. "

" Being able to say something lyrically, to say something that will do more than just be words, is really hard. It's easy to do when you're writing a chapter of a book or writing poetry, but it's really hard to do when you're confined to a melody line. "

" You campaign in poetry. You govern in prose. "

" Any reflection about poetry should begin, or end, with this question: who and how many read poetry books? "

" The experimental poetry thing is not my thing. It's a programme of the avant-garde: basically a refusal of the kind of poetry I write. "

" In the United States, in poetry workshops, it's now quite a thing to make graduate students learn poems by heart. "

" When power leads man toward arrogance, poetry reminds him of his limitations. When power narrows the area of man's concern, poetry reminds him of the richness and diversity of existence. When power corrupts, poetry cleanses. "

" I like to give and get basically anything (I love to read) but especially fiction and poetry. "

" In every culture, in every language, there is expressive play, expressive word play; there's language use to different purposes that we would call poetry. "

" And at least in poetry you should feel free to lie. That is, not to lie, but to imagine what you want, to follow the direction of the poem. "

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

" From the beginnings of literature, poets and writers have based their narratives on crossing borders, on wandering, on exile, on encounters beyond the familiar. The stranger is an archetype in epic poetry, in novels. The tension between alienation and assimilation has always been a basic theme. "