- I had art as a major, along with English, French and History. I had dance, modern dance. In English I was allowed to write my own poetry, which I eventually got published.
- Sally Kirkland on Poetry
- I hardly remember how I started to write poetry. It's hard to imagine what I thought poetry could do.
- David Antin on Poetry
- I have always made my own rules, in poetry as in life - though I have tried of late to cooperate more with my family. I do, however, believe that without order or pattern poetry is useless.
- Anne Stevenson on Poetry
- I have always wanted what I have now come to call the voice of personal narrative. That has always been the appealing voice in poetry. It started for me lyrically in Shakespeare's sonnets.
- Diane Wakoski on Poetry
- I have always written poetry but I have never applied it to songwriting.
- Janine Turner on Poetry
- I have been enlightened. I have fallen into poetry and it has swallowed me up.
- Keith Haring on Poetry
- I have epiphanies all the time, because I'm always thinking. I'm a thinker. I'm always writing poetry, I'm always coming to conclusions.
- Chrisette Michele on Poetry
- I have experienced healing through other writers' poetry, but there's no way I can sit down to write in the hope a poem will have healing potential. If I do, I'll write a bad poem.
- Marilyn Hacker on Poetry
- I have had much to learn from Sweden's poetry and, more especially, from her lyrics of the last generation.
- Knut Hamsun on Poetry
- I have nothing to say, I am saying it, and that is poetry.
- I have piles of poetry books in the bathroom, on the stairs, everywhere. The only way to write poetry is to read it.
- Carol Ann Duffy on Poetry
- I have to admit that I had a lot of problems with poetry.
- Jane Campion on Poetry
- I have written some songs, but I would really call what I've done poetry at the end of the day, because I'll sit with my guitar for hours and hours on end for, like, a week and then I won't touch it for a month. I also just have no confidence. And you know what? I don't have time, because I'd rather be doing other things, like knitting.
- Amanda Seyfried on Poetry
- I heard Nirvana, and discovered that songs could be like poetry, but a little bit more refined: you didn't have to have 20 verses to get your point across.
- Justin Townes Earle on Poetry
- I knew what book we had to write, it was clear in my head it was journals and poetry. So I passed on their offer. I told my agent this is our vision, and no one's done it this way.
- Kenny Loggins on Poetry
- I know I'm not a wordsmith. And I don't write poetry. Sometimes I think I should, because it's really helpful. But I always wanted to write novels.
- Candace Bushnell on Poetry
- I learned to impersonate the kind of person that talks about poetry. It comes from teaching, I think.
- Robert Morgan on Poetry
- I like poems that are little games.
- Peter Davison on Poetry
- I like the beauty of Faulkner's poetry. But I don't like his themes, not at all.
- Manuel Puig on Poetry
- I like the way words go together and I like the gamesmanship of writing poetry. It is such a challenge.
- Jeffery Deaver on Poetry
- I look for poetry in English because it's the only language I read.
- Jack Prelutsky on Poetry
- I love painting and music, of course. I don't know nearly as much about them as I know about poetry. I've certainly been influenced by fiction. I was overwhelmed by War and Peace when I read it, and I didn't read it until I was in my late 20s.
- Kenneth Koch on Poetry
- I love romantic poetry.
- Richard Dawkins on Poetry
- I love Sufism as I love beautiful poetry, but it is not the answer. Sufism is like a mirage in the desert. It says to you, come and sit, relax and enjoy yourself for a while.
- Naguib Mahfouz on Poetry
- I love to compare different time frames. Poetry can evoke the time of the subject. By a very careful choice of words you can evoke an era, completely throw the poem into a different time scale.
- Robert Morgan on Poetry
- I love to write poetry.
- Shayne Ward on Poetry
- I never really liked poetry readings I liked to read poetry by myself, but I liked singing, chanting my lyrics to this jazz group.
- Leonard Cohen on Poetry
- I never think about poetry except when I'm writing it. I mean my poetry.
- Norman MacCaig on Poetry
- I never thought I'd be doing poetry books. I never really studied poetry. But the first one I did was after my mother died, and I realized that people sort of think and talk about her style and fashion, but in fact, what made her the person she was was really her love of reading and ideas.
- Caroline Kennedy on Poetry
- I often imagine that the longer he studies English literature the more the Japanese student must be astonished at the extraordinary predominance given to the passion of love both in fiction and in poetry.
- Lafcadio Hearn on Poetry
- I published, privately, a collection of my serious poetry I had written over the years. I only published 50 copies, which I gave to friends, in a special deluxe edition. It was ridiculously expensive but I'm glad that I did it.
- Tom Glazer on Poetry
- I read as much poetry as time allows and circumstance dictates: No heartache can pass without a little Dorothy Parker, no thunderstorm without W. H. Auden, no sleepless night without W. B. Yeats.
- J. Courtney Sullivan on Poetry
- I read poetry to save time.
- Marilyn Monroe on Poetry
- I realized poetry's the thing that I can do 'cause I can stick at it and work with tremendous intensity.
- Philip Levine on Poetry
- I really enjoy English and poetry and writing classes.
- Taylor Momsen on Poetry
- I see a resurgence of interest in poetry. I am less optimistic about the prospects for the arts when it comes to federal funding.
- I see architecture not as Gropius did, as a moral venture, as truth, but as invention, in the same way that poetry or music or painting is invention.
- Michael Graves on Poetry
- I see no reason for calling my work poetry except that there is no other category in which to put it.
- Marianne Moore on Poetry
- I see people who talk about America, and then undermine it by not paying attention to its soul, to its poetry. I see polarization, reductionism and superficiality.
- Azar Nafisi on Poetry
- I sometimes talk about the making of a poem within the poem.
- Howard Nemerov on Poetry
- I started off in England and very few people knew I was Australian. I mean, the clues were in the poems, but they didn't read them very carefully, and so for years and years I was considered completely part of the English poetry scene.
- Peter Porter on Poetry
- I still read Donne, particularly his love poems.
- Carol Ann Duffy on Poetry
- I think Ginsberg has done more harm to the craft that I honor and live by than anybody else by reducing it to a kind of mean that enables the most dubious practitioners to claim they are poets because they think, If the kind of thing Ginsberg does is poetry, I can do that.
- James Dickey on Poetry
- I think I'm a very good reader of poetry, but obviously, like everybody, I have a set of criteria for reading poems, and I'm not shy about presenting them, so if people ask for my critical response to a poem, I tell them what works and why, and what doesn't work and why.
- Diane Wakoski on Poetry
- I think it comes from really liking literary forms. Poetry is very beautiful, but the space on the page can be as affecting as where the text is. Like when Miles Davis doesn't play, it has a poignancy to it.
- Jim Jarmusch on Poetry
- I think it was T.S. Eliot who talked about good poetry being felt before it's understood. I believe that. There are some bands where I love their lyrics but I don't have a clue what they're on about.
- Marcus Mumford on Poetry
- I think poetry can help children deal with the other subjects on the curriculum by enabling them to see a subject in a new way.
- Carol Ann Duffy on Poetry
- I think poetry has lost an awful lot of its muscle because nobody knows any. Nobody has to memorize poetry.
- Peter Davison on Poetry
- I think poetry is best read to oneself.
- Rickie Lee Jones on Poetry
- I think that concrete poetry seems to have, as far as I can see, come to a kind of a dead end. It doesn't seem to be going any further than it went in its high period of about five or six years ago.
- James Laughlin on Poetry
1 2 3 4 5