Quotes About Expression

[My] hunger and thirst was, and still remains: How do I get people who hate poetry to love me?

Ultimately I have learned more about poetry, from music and magic than from literature.

Americans are not brought up with meter. They're not brought up with poetry. If you try to get them to recite, they're too embarrassed.

Hopefully I can inspire lots of people to learn about [Patti Smith], to read poetry or learn about William Blake or Arthur Rimbaud.

Good prose is written only face to face with poetry.

Poetry is the universal possession of mankind, revealing itself everywhere, and at all times, in hundreds and hundreds of men.

You don't have to know the whole language to use it usefully, you can do baby talk, you can do grown up talk, you can cuss in it, you can write poetry, you can be a playwright, is sort of the idea.

I came to poetry because I felt I couldn't live properly in the real world.

To write at the same temperature at which I live I should write nothing but poetry.

It is impossible to translate poetry. Can you translate music?

To do a poem justice, explain what makes it unique; to get a poem noticed, explain what makes it typical.

Poetry and I fit together. I can't imagine being without it... It is food and drink, it is all seasons, it is the stuff of all existence.

The sense of the preciousness of the body - vehicle for poetry.

There's no preparation for poetry.

I blessed the power which has filled my life with poetry.

If it were not for poetry, few men would ever fall in love.

The power of verse stems from an indefinable harmony between when it says and what it is.

During the last years of Mayakovski's life, when all poetry had ceased to exist . . . literature had stopped.

And a lot of times in slam poetry I feel like people are so worried about the performance that the words might not be as strong.

As I started writing about loss and grief, I was taking what felt unmanageable and using my songwriting, my sense of poetry and discipline, to try and make it manageable.

We were clever enough to turn a laundry list into poetry.

Bob Dylan truly is a poet whose song is part of the poetry.

I can find some way to make poetry out of my life's experiences.

An undevout poet is an impossibility.