Quotes About Expression

Literature is always something - it is either story or poetry, ideally both. That is, you always know what it is and even if the interpretation is not available, the experience of language is.

I feel deep gratitude for the life poetry has allowed me to live. I know the life I could have lived without it. Both on the physical plain, and the soul plain. Poetry helps us endure.

I'd rather call prose poems something else, for clarity - something like "poetic prose," prose that contains a quality of poetry, but not poems.

Poetry is one of the most full ways of discovering what it feels like to be a human being in this particular moment, in this particular set of concerns. It's all about discovery.

I wanted to be a composer for a while, and for a while, and maybe still, I found writing music much easier than writing poetry. So maybe my brain clings to it.

For whatever reason, people, including very well-educated people or people otherwise interested in reading, do not read poetry

More people than ever are slowly but surely turning their ears toward poetry

Poetry uses language to create a music borne inside human experiences and emotions.

I'm a firm believer in the idea that theater excels over film and TV in its ability to let people play with poetry.

I allow no hot-beds in the gardens of Parnassus.

I am a self-appointed ambassador for poetry.

Prose and poetry are as different as food and drink.

I go to a lot of museums, I read a ton of poetry - anything that's a creative expression of oneself, I find really inspiring.

There is a certain flimsiness of poetry which seems expedient in a song.

I don't believe in tame poetry. . . . Poetry busts guts.

When I was sixteen, it was simple. Poetry existed; therefore it could be written; and nobody had told me — yet — the many, many reasons why it could not be written by me.

There's very little of the intentional about the business of writing poetry, as least as far as I can see.

I would say my life experiences are my poetry, whether I'm writing about those actual, factual experiences or not.

You're alone with yourself and your own feelings and that gives you deeper access to what you need to get in touch with to write poetry.

I am not ridiculing verbal mechanisms, dreams, or repressions as origins of poetry; all three of them and more besides may have a great deal to do with it.

For my part, if I consider poetry as an object, I maintain that it is born of the necessity of adding a vocal sound (speech) to the hammering of the first tribal music.

I don't want to bury anything in poetry.

Poetry doesn't function by saying things straightforwardly because the language is too imprecise, too limited often, to address the underlying subject of most poems.

Nearly everybody is looking for something brave to do. I don't know why people shouldn't write poetry. That's brave.