If you don't mark your successes the day your ship comes in could be just another day at the office and there's no poetry in that.

I think we fool ourselves and really negate a great deal of history if we think that the oral history of poetry is shorter than the written history of poetry. It's not true. Poetry has a longer oral tradition than it does written.

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

I was always making up rhymes. But I never thought that poetry would become my life.

You can find poetry in your everyday life your memory in what people say on the bus in the news or just what's in your heart.

I think poetry can help children deal with the other subjects on the curriculum by enabling them to see a subject in a new way.

Auden said poetry makes nothing happen. But I wonder if the opposite could be true. It could make something happen.

Poetry and prayer are very similar.

It's always good when women win things in fiction because it tends to be more male-dominated unlike poetry which is more equal.

Even if you only want to write science fiction you should also read mysteries poetry mainstream literature history biography philosophy and science.

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.

I'm as much influenced by Joseph Smith and the Mormons as I am more so than by Eliot. Actually I'm much more influenced by the poetry of the Mormons.

I'm quite sure that most writers would sustain real poetry if they could but it takes devotion and talent.

I like the way words go together and I like the gamesmanship of writing poetry. It is such a challenge.

I've always written all my life and when I was very young I developed an interest in poetry.

So I really began as a failed poet - although when I first wanted to be a writer I learned to write prose by reading poetry.

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.

When I really want to be soothed and reminded of why people bother to fiddle with sentences I often read poetry.

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.

I was a visual artist primarily and a writer even from a very young age. I wrote a lot of stories and poetry and... I had a desire to create always. And I always had a desire to show my work.

I work on words mostly toward them being poetry or short stories and then some of those become songs. They all find their place in the world but they all start off in the same place. I'm always painting and drawing as well and it's an ongoing creative assignment.

If you go into a bar in most places in America and even say the word poetry you'll probably get beaten up. But poetry is a really strong beautiful form to me and a lot of innovation in language comes from poetry.

I think it comes from really liking literary forms. Poetry is very beautiful but the space on the page can be as affecting as where the text is. Like when Miles Davis doesn't play it has a poignancy to it.

It is the timber of poetry that wears most surely and there is no timber that has not strong roots among the clay and worms.