I love painting and music of course. I don't know nearly as much about them as I know about poetry. I've certainly been influenced by fiction. I was overwhelmed by War and Peace when I read it and I didn't read it until I was in my late 20s.

And my father was a comic. He could play any musical instrument. He loved to perform. He was a wonderfully comedic character. He had the ability to dance and sing and charm and analyze poetry.

I guess the two Manifesto Communicating Vessels Mad Love and some of his poetry made a significant mark on me but as far as bringing a literary element into the music I see it as a much broader assimilation.

From my music training I knew that some Spanish rhythms apart 5/4 is a time signature used only in the modern era. Holst's Mars from the Planets is 5/4. But if you speak lines of poetry in that pattern you just end up hitting the off-beats. It's only when you add a rest - a sixth beat - that it sounds as it surely should sound.

There is an urgent need for Americans to look deeply into themselves and their actions and musical poetry is perhaps the most effective mirror available. Every newspaper headline is a potential song.

The music just tends to be a vehicle for that poetry.

The romanticised life where all the great poetry and music and art of the world comes from is great but it requires a lot of self-indulgence.

While I've had a great distaste for what's usually called song in modern poetry or for what's usually called music I really don't think of speech as so far from song.

Art works because it appeals to certain faculties of the mind. Music depends on details of the auditory system painting and sculpture on the visual system. Poetry and literature depend on language.

Slowly poetry becomes visual because it paints images but it is also musical: it unites two arts into one.

The lines of poetry the period of prose and even the texts of Scripture most frequently recollected and quoted are those which are felt to be preeminently musical.

Rap is poetry to music like beatniks without beards and bongos.

I try to show what it is about language and music that enthralls because I think those are the two elements of poetry.

The world is full of poetry. The air is living with its spirit and the waves dance to the music of its melodies and sparkle in its brightness.

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.

Rap is poetry set to music. But to me it's like a jackhammer.

I've written poetry since I was in the first grade and it wasn't until I was a little bit older that I realized poetry could be put to music and become a song.

Poetry and music are very good friends. Like mommies and daddies and strawberries and cream - they go together.

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.

I came into music because I thought the presentation of poetry wasn't vibrant enough. So I merged improvised poetry with basic rock chords.

One difference between poetry and lyrics is that lyrics sort of fade into the background. They fade on the page and live on the stage when set to music.

The musician is perhaps the most modest of animals but he is also the proudest. It is he who invented the sublime art of ruining poetry.

Poetry is plucking at the heartstrings and making music with them.

When I lived in New York not only did I have safety locks on the door but I had the music going keeping the city at a distance trying to find creative time and peace and so forth.