Quotes About Expression

Poetry is a tracing of the trajectories of a finite sound to the infinite points of its echoes.

That's the main business of the poem!-to see if you can't make up a language that sets all your selves talking at once-all of them being fair to each other.

I think that if poetry is not a personal act, it's a pamphlet.

For me, the measure of a poem is the word, not the line.

It's a good thing to get poetry off the shelves and more into public life.

When I first started to write poetry, I used to feel as if my tongue would go numb.

Our best history is still poetry.

Poems are ways of saying you clearly remember the day of your death and your tomb. When I am writing poetry, I relive my days when a woman inside me dies many times.

I always did poetry, and [rap music is] pretty much hip-hop melody with poems.

I write poetry anyway and have for years and years. For me, putting fiction and poetry together is like the best of both worlds.

when a poem says something that could not have been said in any other way, in music, prose, sculpture, movement or paint, then it is poetry.

I think it's true that that's something that poetry can go to school on fiction. I think poetry can go to fiction to learn.

Are democracy and poetry exclusive of one another and, if so, why?

It is fatal to decide, intellectually, what good poetry is because you are then in honour bound to try to write it, instead of the poems that only you can write.

No verse which is unmusical or obscure can be regarded as poetry whatever other qualities it may possess.

Reading a piece of poetry with no beat in front of 20 people is way more challenging than rocking for 10,000 people.

Most of humanity gets by without reading novels or poetry, and no one would deny the richness of their thoughts.

I don't think poetry will die, but I think that poetry does demand a certain kind of attention to language.

When we let ourselves respond to poetry, to music, to pictures, we are clearing a space where new stories can root, in effect we are clearing a space for new stories about ourselves.

My style of performance poetry came from the beatniks, Allen Ginsberg.

In poetry everything which must be said is almost impossible to say well.

One of the ways in which I feel close to God is writing poetry.

but as God said, crossing his legs, I see where I have made plenty of poets but not so very much poetry.

Poetry had breathed over and sanctified the land.