And at least in poetry you should feel free to lie. That is, not to lie, but to imagine what you want, to follow the direction of the poem. – Mark Strand
A life is not sufficiently elevated for poetry, unless, of course, the life has been made into an art. – Mark Strand
A great many people seem to think writing poetry is worthwhile, even though it pays next to nothing and is not as widely read as it should be. – Mark Strand
Well, I had this little notion – I started writing when I was eleven, writing poetry. I was passionately addicted to it it was my great refuge through adolescence. – Harry Mathews
The poetry community here has been extraordinarily welcoming. – George Murray
Then I discovered I loved writing poetry more than fiction. – George Murray
Writing poetry makes you intensely conscious of how words sound, both aloud and inside the head of the reader. You learn the weight of words and how they sound to the ear. – Helen Dunmore
I began the way nearly everybody I ever heard of – I began writing poetry. And I find that to be quite usual with writers, their trying their hand at poetry. – Shelby Foote
I used to write sonnets and various things, and moved from there into writing prose, which, incidentally, is a lot more interesting than poetry, including the rhythms of prose. – Shelby Foote
So I suppose poetry, language, the shaping of it, was and remains for me an effort to make sense out of essentially senseless situations. – Thomas Lynch
Poetry is all nouns and verbs. – Marianne Moore
I see no reason for calling my work poetry except that there is no other category in which to put it. – Marianne Moore
Poetry, especially traditional Iranian poetry, is very good at looking at things from a number of different angles simultaneously. – Asghar Farhadi
I was excited by what my painter friends were doing, and they seemed to be interested in our poetry too, and that was a wonderful little, fizzy sort of world. – Kenneth Koch
I wonder if I ever thought of an ideal reader… I guess when I was in my 20s and in New York and maybe even in my early 30s, I would write for my wife Janice… mainly for my poet friends and my wife, who was very smart about poetry. – Kenneth Koch
I believe that the short story is as different a form from the novel as poetry is, and the best stories seem to me to be perhaps closer in spirit to poetry than to novels. – Tobias Wolff
Poetry teaches us music, metaphor, condensation and specificity. – Walter Mosley
But it is the province of religion, of philosophy, of pure poetry only, to go beyond life, beyond time, into eternity. – Alfred de Vigny
Most people ignore most poetry because most poetry ignores most people. – Adrian Mitchell
Written poetry is different. Best thing is to see it in performance first, then read it. Performance is more provocative. – Adrian Mitchell
