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" You don't help people in your poems. I've been trying to help people all my life - that's my trouble. "

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" I started playing guitar when I was 13. I'd written a few songs on the guitar over some time. I'd written a book of poetry, and I got a book of lyrics that I had when I was a kid. "

" I think poetry is a fabulous medium to encapsulate thoughts far more precisely than prose. "

" 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.' "

" Lena Dunham and Jenni Konner, who founded Lenny Books together, also happen to have exquisite reading tastes - from obscure small press poetry chapbook to dishy memoirs to literary novels - and so it's a real honor that they've chosen to announce their imprint with my stories. "

" On the subject of literary genres, I've always felt that my response to poetry is inadequate. I'd love to be the kind of person that drifts off into the garden with a slim volume of Elizabethan verse or a sheaf of haikus, but my passion is story. "

" Poetry is emotion, passion, love, grief - everything that is human. It is not for zombies by zombies. "

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

" I believe in the power of poetry, which gives me reasons to look ahead and identify a glint of light. "

Mahmoud Darwish

" When I was asked to be Writer in Residence at Edinburgh I thought, you can't teach poetry. This is ridiculous. "

" I was quiet, and I was artistic. I liked writing poetry, and that was very strange, so I was bullied a lot. "

" 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. "

" I started writing poetry as a teenager in suburban Chicago out of emotional desperation. "

" I saw the gooseflesh on my skin. I did not know what made it. I was not cold. Had a ghost passed over? No, it was the poetry. "

" Of course a poem is a two-way street. No poem is any good if it doesn't suggest to the reader things from his own mind and recollection that he will read into it, and will add to what the poet has suggested. But I do think poetry readings are very important. "

" Learn poetry by heart. If you know a poem by heart, no one can take it away from you, and you can take advantage of it anytime. "

" The business of the poet is not to find new emotions, but to use the ordinary ones and, in working them up into poetry, to express feelings which are not in actual emotions at all. "

" I cannot speak for more than an hour exclusively about poetry. At that point, life itself takes over again. "

Wislawa Szymborska

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

Vladimir Nabokov

" Rap is rhythm and poetry. Hip-hop is storytelling and poetry as well. "

" Lizzie Magie was a pretty astonishing woman. She was an outspoken feminist, she had acted, she had done some performing, she had written some poetry, and she was a game designer. "

" I like poems that are little games. "

" I began the way nearly everybody I ever heard of - I began writing poetry. And I find that to be quite usual with writers, their trying their hand at poetry. "

" I didn't start off as a journalist; I started off as a poet. My ambition was to practise poetry. Then I found journalism, but that other voice never fled from me. "

Ta-Nehisi Coates

" You're shadowed by your own dream, especially as you get older, of trying to create something that will last in poetry. And so, you're working on its behalf. "

" A definition of poetry can only determine what poetry should be and not what poetry actually was and is; otherwise the most concise formula would be: Poetry is that which at some time and some place was thus named. "

Karl Wilhelm Friedrich Schlegel

" A group of us started a community center in Santa Monica. We've tried different programs, and three have worked really well. A poetry group. Once a week we visit Venice High and talk to girls at risk. "

" 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

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

Johann Georg Hamann

" I don't think rap really fits in to 'American Idol' in the sense that I believe rap is an art form in itself more akin to poetry, more akin to drama, if you will. "

" Sufi poetry is, in a sense, self-help poetry about how to live a decent life, how to deal with your mortality. "