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" Poetry is the mother-tongue of the human race. "

Johann Georg Hamann

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" I read poetry to save time. "

" I certainly derived my skills as a prose writer from my scrutiny of poetry and of the individual word. But schools don't do things like that anymore - tracking words down to their roots. "

" Painting (like poetry) chooses from universals what is most apposite. It brings together, in a single imaginary being, circumstances and characteristics which occur in nature in many different persons. "

" The muse, the beloved, and duende are three ways of thinking of what is the source of poetry, and all three seem to me different names or different ways to think about something that is not entirely reasonable, not entirely subject to the will, not entirely rational. "

" If you read quickly to get through a poem to what it means, you have missed the body of the poem. "

" Why should poetry have to make sense? "

Charlie Chaplin

" You have to be careful about over-politicizing the utterances of people of colour because, oftentimes, there's poetry that seeks to go beyond that narrative. "

" The actual world, not some fantastic structure that has nothing to do with reality, must provide the material for modern poetry. "

Muriel Rukeyser

" I'm not really a musician. I'm a performer, and I love rock n' roll. I've embraced rock n' roll because it encompasses all the things I'm interested in: poetry, revolution, sexuality, political activism - all of these things can be found in rock n' roll. "

" When we were 15, my girlfriend Ruth Kaplan and I applied to the Universidad Ibero-Americana in Mexico City. We were accepted into a program that placed us with a lovely Mexican family. We lived with them for six weeks while studying Spanish poetry and Mexican anthropology. "

Mary Doria Russell

" A poet must be a psychologist, but a secret one: he should know and feel the roots of phenomena but present only the phenomena themselves in full bloom or as they fade away. "

" 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. "

" I wrote some of the worst poetry west from the Mississippi River, but I wrote. And I finally sometimes got it right. "

" My exposure to Beckett and to late O'Neill was probably important right at the time I gave up poetry and the novel. "

" And the second question, can poetry be taught? I didn't think so. "

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

" I gave up on new poetry myself 30 years ago when most of it began to read like coded messages passing between lonely aliens in a hostile world. "

" 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. "

" That sense of a life in natural objects, which in most poetry is but a rhetorical artifice, was, then, in Wordsworth the assertion of what was for him almost literal fact. "

" The poetry that sustains me is when I feel that, for a minute, the clouds have parted and I've seen ecstasy or something. "

" Poetry involves the mysteries of the irrational perceived through rational words. "

Vladimir Nabokov

" I'm conscious of a series of circles working its way through my life. And at this particular moment I have come round to the beginning of my writing cycle. It begins with poetry. There's hardly a day that goes past on which I don't write poetry. "

" Listeners are kind of ambushed... if a poem just happens to be said when they're listening to the radio. The listener doesn't have time to deploy what I call their 'poetry deflector shields' that were installed in high school - there's little time to resist the poem. "

" Painting is silent poetry, and poetry is painting that speaks. "

" Poetry is a deal of joy and pain and wonder, with a dash of the dictionary. "

" 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

" The weakness of ourselves and of our reason makes us see flaws in beauties by making us consider everything piece by piece. "

Johann Georg Hamann

" Poetry takes place in time. It is a durational. Things take place in sequence. "

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

" I wrote poetry before I wrote songs, and T.S. Eliot was my inspiration. I love his honesty and try to bring that to my own songwriting. "

Gabrielle Aplin