- I think that great poetry is the most interesting and complex use of the poet's language at that point in history, and so it's even more exciting when you read a poet like Yeats, almost 100 years old now, and you think that perhaps no one can really top that.
- Diane Wakoski on Poetry
- I think that is where poetry reading becomes such an individual thing. I mean I have friend who like poets who just don't say anything to me at all, I mean they seem to me rather ordinary and pedestrian.
- James Laughlin on Poetry
- I think that it's more likely that in my 60s and 70s I will be writing poetry rather than fiction.
- Robert Morgan on Poetry
- I think that one possible definition of our modern culture is that it is one in which nine-tenths of our intellectuals can't read any poetry.
- Randall Jarrell on Poetry
- I think that the job of poetry, its political job, is to refresh the idea of justice, which is going dead in us all the time.
- Robert Hass on Poetry
- I think that there is nothing, not even crime, more opposed to poetry, to philosophy, ay, to life itself than this incessant business.
- Henry David Thoreau on Poetry
- I think that's what poetry does. It allows people to come together and identify with a common thing that is outside of themselves, but which they identify with from the interior.
- Diane Wakoski on Poetry
- I think the best American poetry is the poetry that utilizes the resources of poetry rather than exploits the defects or triumphs of the poet's personality.
- Mark Strand on Poetry
- I think the term poet is a very exalted term and should be applied to a man at the end of his work. When he looks back over the body of his work and he's written poetry then let the verdict be that he's a poet.
- Leonard Cohen on Poetry
- I think there are things in my story that have helped my creativity. Your father being killed, for instance, is one of the best things that could happen to a kid if he's going to write poetry or songs.
- Roger Waters on Poetry
- I think there was a revolution in poetry, associated chiefly with Eliot and Pound but maybe it is of the nature of revolutions or of the nature of history that their innovations should later come to look trivial or indistinguishable from technical tricks.
- Howard Nemerov on Poetry
- I think there's no excuse for the American poetry reader not knowing a good deal about what is going on in the rest of the world.
- James Laughlin on Poetry
- I think we fool ourselves and really negate a great deal of history if we think that the oral history of poetry is shorter than the written history of poetry. It's not true. Poetry has a longer oral tradition than it does written.
- Saul Williams on Poetry
- I think we will always have the impulse towards visual poetry with us, and I wouldn't agree with Bly that it's a bad thing. It depends on the ability of the individual poet to do it well, and to make a shape which is interesting enough to hold your attention.
- James Laughlin on Poetry
- I think when kids just see well-crafted poetry, it's just obtuse to them. It's hard to relate to.
- I thought to spend my declining years writing poetry and teaching - but that won't pay the Bergdorf's bill. I think I'll move to somewhere life is cheaper.
- Erica Jong on Poetry
- I thought we were gonna open up the world of poetry and music to all kinds of things, and yet, I can't really think of anyone who's done anything like it since.
- Ray Manzarek on Poetry
- I try to show what it is about language and music that enthralls, because I think those are the two elements of poetry.
- I use rock and jazz and blues rhythms because I love that music. I hope my poetry has a relationship with good-time rock'n roll.
- Adrian Mitchell on Poetry
- I used to joke that if acting didn't work out, poetry was my commonsense fallback.
- Merritt Wever on Poetry
- I used to write sonnets and various things, and moved from there into writing prose, which, incidentally, is a lot more interesting than poetry, including the rhythms of prose.
- Shelby Foote on Poetry
- I want a fever, in poetry: a fever, and tranquillity.
- James Dickey on Poetry
- I want people to bow as they see me and say he is gifted with poetry, he has seen the presence of the creator.
- Allen Ginsberg on Poetry
- I want to branch out. I want to write. I write poetry. I want to see my children grow up well.
- Annie Lennox on Poetry
- I want to promote poetry to the point where you got all the baldhead kids running around doing poetry, getting the music out of the way and having only words, the spoken word, and then see what happens.
- Russell Simmons on Poetry
- I want to write a book of poetry, as well as children's stories.
- Bobby McFerrin on Poetry
- I wanted to reimagine the role, in a way that was respectful of its traditional responsibilities but made them part of a wider pattern of poetry about national incidents, events, preoccupations and to spend a great deal of time going to schools trying to demystify poetry.
- Andrew Motion on Poetry
- I was a 16-year-old girl at one point, so of course I wrote poetry.
- Elizabeth Edwards on Poetry
- I was a visual artist primarily and a writer, even from a very young age. I wrote a lot of stories and poetry and... I had a desire to create always. And I always had a desire to show my work.
- P. J. Harvey on Poetry
- I was always interested in French poetry sort of as a sideline to my own work, I was translating contemporary French poets. That kind of spilled out into translation as a way to earn money, pay for food and put bread on the table.
- Paul Auster on Poetry
- I was always making up rhymes. But I never thought that poetry would become my life.
- Saul Williams on Poetry
- I was apprehensive. I feared every time I talked about poetry, it would be filtered through the lens of race, sex, and age.
- I was excited by what my painter friends were doing, and they seemed to be interested in our poetry too, and that was a wonderful little, fizzy sort of world.
- Kenneth Koch on Poetry
- I was in Paris at an English-language bookstore. I picked up a volume of Dickinson's poetry. I came back to my hotel, read 2,000 of her poems and immediately began composing in my head. I wrote down the melodies even before I got to a piano.
- Gordon Getty on Poetry
- I was influenced by surrealist poetry and painting as were thousands of other people, and it seems to me to have become a part of the way I write, but it's not.
- Kenneth Koch on Poetry
- I was kind of an outcast in school 'cause I always kept to myself and was writing poetry and then going on tour with my brother band all the time, so kids didn't know what to make of me.
- Christina Perri on Poetry
- I was one of those dark, quiet kids that wrote poetry.
- Rick Springfield on Poetry
- I was reading the dictionary. I thought it was a poem about everything.
- Steven Wright on Poetry
- I was trained as an actress. But I wasn't a very convincing actress, so I started doing punk poetry and then fell into doing stand-up.
- Jenny Eclair on Poetry
- I was very interested in American poetry for many years. Much less now.
- Norman MacCaig on Poetry
- I will not leave a corner of my consciousness covered up, but saturate myself with the strange and extraordinary new conditions of this life, and it will all refine itself into poetry later on.
- Isaac Rosenberg on Poetry
- I wish our clever young poets would remember my homely definitions of prose and poetry that is, prose = words in their best order - poetry = the best words in the best order.
- Samuel Taylor Coleridge on Poetry
- I wish you would read a little poetry sometimes. Your ignorance cramps my conversation.
- Anthony Hope on Poetry
- I wonder if I ever thought of an ideal reader... I guess when I was in my 20s and in New York and maybe even in my early 30s, I would write for my wife Janice... mainly for my poet friends and my wife, who was very smart about poetry.
- Kenneth Koch on Poetry
- I work on words, mostly, toward them being poetry or short stories, and then some of those become songs. They all find their place in the world, but they all start off in the same place. I'm always painting and drawing as well, and it's an ongoing creative assignment.
- P. J. Harvey on Poetry
- I would define, in brief, the poetry of words as the rhythmical creation of Beauty.
- Edgar Allan Poe on Poetry
- I would say that American poetry has always been a poetry of personal testimony.
- Mark Strand on Poetry
- I write all the time - I write poetry, I love to write.
- Colin Quinn on Poetry
- I write poetry in order to live more fully.
- Judith Rodriguez on Poetry
- I wrote some bad poetry that I published in North African journals, but even as I withdrew into this reading, I also led the life of a kind of young hooligan.
- Jacques Derrida on Poetry
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