Perhaps no person can be a poet or even enjoy poetry without a certain unsoundness of mind.

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.

When I was in college I used to write little ditties and short stories and poetry for my friends. Writing a book is another thing. It is so much different from my traditional day of dirty fingernails and greasy hair and hot pans.

If poetry should address itself to the same needs and aspirations the same hopes and fears to which the Bible addresses itself it might rival it in distribution.

In poetry you must love the words the ideas and the images and rhythms with all your capacity to love anything at all.

Most people read poetry listening for echoes because the echoes are familiar to them. They wade through it the way a boy wades through water feeling with his toes for the bottom: The echoes are the bottom.

With several different kinds of poetry to choose from a man would decide that he would like best to be an epic poet and he would set out in conscious determination on an epic poem.

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.

I never thought I'd be doing poetry books. I never really studied poetry. But the first one I did was after my mother died and I realized that people sort of think and talk about her style and fashion but in fact what made her the person she was was really her love of reading and ideas.

The biggest problem is people are afraid of poetry think they can't understand it or that it will be boring.

Poetry is really a way of sharing feelings and ideas.

Colloquial poetry is to the real art as the barber's wax dummy is to sculpture.

There is something about poetry beyond prose logic there is mystery in it not to be explained but admired.

Living here on Earth we breathe the rhythms of a universe that extends infinitely above us. When resonant harmonies arise between this vast outer cosmos and the inner human cosmos poetry is born.

If a poem is not memorable there's probably something wrong. One of the problems of free verse is that much of the free verse poetry is not memorable.

Poetry lies its way to the truth.

It's always a combination of physics and poetry that I find inspiring. It's hard to wrap your head around things like the Hubble scope.

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

The subject of Finnish poetry ought to have a special interest for the Japanese student if only for the reason that Finnish poetry comes more closely in many respects to Japanese poetry than any other form of Western poetry.

Poetry is adolescence fermented and thus preserved.

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 thought to spend my declining years writing poetry and teaching - but that won't pay the Bergdorf's bill. I think I'll move to somewhere life is cheaper.

Poetry is the language we speak in the most terrifying or ecstatic passages of our lives. But the very word poetry scares people. They think of their grade school teachers reciting 'Hiawatha' and they groan.