Poetry Quotes - page 84

The poet, distracted by politics, asks of poetry that it make itself useful like metal or flour, that it get ready to stain its face with coal dust and fight body to body. (Eduardo Galeano)
You know, in my music career there was a moment where the irony was just so heavy. There were people in my audience that were the reason I developed neuroses. These people that tortured my life were using my art, my poetry, as fuel for them, to torture other people. View quote
Fred Durst
The one version of the bourgeois comprises the artisan, the trader, the official, the financier, and the entrepreneur, all of whom, in their own way, can claim to know what labor is. Juxtaposed to them from the beginning, stands a type of bourgeois who does research, writes poetry, composes and makes music, and philosophizes and who believes that these activities develop a world that is self-sufficient. It is obvious that these two fractions of the bourgeois ego get on only superficially and come together only in the hollow connection of property and cultivation. They create the century-long tension between the good and the evil bourgeois, the idealist and the exploiter, the visionary and the pragmatist, the ideally liberated bourgeois and the laboring bourgeois. This tension remains as inexhaustible as that between the world of work and "freedom” in general. View quote
Peter Sloterdijk
Lyric poetry is, of course, musical in origin. I do know that what happened to poetry in the twentieth century was that it began to be written for the page. When it's a question of typography, why not? Poets have done beautiful things with typography - Apollinaire's 'Calligrammes,' that sort of thing. View quote
James Fenton
My feeling is that poetry will wither on the vine if you don't regularly come back to the simplest fundamentals of the poem: rhythm, rhyme, simple subjects - love, death, war. View quote
James Fenton
One problem we face comes from the lack of any agreed sense of how we should be working to train ourselves to write poetry. View quote
James Fenton
Great poetry does not have to be technically intricate. View quote
James Fenton
The voice is raised, and that is where poetry begins. And even today, in the prolonged aftermath of modernism, in places where "open form" or free verse is the orthodoxy, you will find a memory of that raising of the voice in the term "heightened speech". View quote
James Fenton
Poetry is not a metrical exercise. View quote
James Fenton
Modernism in other arts brought extreme difficulty. In poetry, the characteristic difficulty imported under the name of modernism was obscurity. But obscurity could just as easily be a quality of metrical as of free verse. View quote
James Fenton
A glance at the history of European poetry is enough to inform us that rhyme itself is not indispensable. Latin poetry in the classical age had no use for it, and the kind of Latin poetry that does rhyme - as for instance the medieval 'Carmina Burana' - tends to be somewhat crude stuff in comparison with the classical verse that doesn't. (James Fenton)
English poetry begins whenever we decide to say the modern English language begins, and it extends as far as we decide to say that the English language extends. View quote
James Fenton
Composers need words, but they do not necessarily need poetry. The Russian composer, Aleksandr Mossolov, who chose texts from newspaper small ads, had a good point to make. With revolutionary music, any text can be set to work. View quote
James Fenton
Whoever can endure unmixed delight, whoever can tolerate music and painting and poetry all in one, whoever wishes to be rid of thought and to let the busy anvils of the brain be silent for a time, let him read in the 'Faery Queen.' View quote
James Russell Lowell
Poetry, the best of it, is lunar and is concerned with the essential insanities. Journalism is solar (there are numerous newspapers named The Sun, none called The Moon) and is devoted to the inessential. View quote
Tom Robbins
In this room, the salamander was squashed between the pages of the rhyming dictionary, thereby changing poetry forever. Here, Salome walked around with a big red fish held high up over her head. Old Father spanked her with a ballet slipper, sending her to bed without milk or honey. Dance was changed in this room, too. View quote
Tom Robbins
The star wasn't poetry until the madwoman discovered it. View quote
Giannina Braschi
Let's begin by affirming that poetry has died. View quote
Giannina Braschi
Poetry must find ways of breaking distance. View quote
Giannina Braschi
Poetry is this screaming madwoman. View quote
Giannina Braschi
I owe everything to a system that made me learn by heart till I wept. As a result I have thousands of lines of poetry by heart. I owe everything to this. (George Steiner)
Poetry is a life-cherishing force. For poems are not words, after all, but fires for the cold, ropes let down to the lost, something as necessary as bread in the pockets of the hungry. Yes indeed. View quote
Mary Oliver
Poetry isn't a profession, it's a way of life. It's an empty basket; you put your life into it and make something out of that. View quote
Mary Oliver
People want poetry. They need poetry. They get it. They don't want fancy work. View quote
Mary Oliver
One thing I do know is that poetry, to be understood, must be clear. View quote
Mary Oliver