I recently read that it's the left brain that does all that calculating, and the right brain that does the poetry. Somehow I've veered way towards the left. I've been doing it for years. Maybe I do art to balance it out.
When I hit a block, regardless of what I am writing, what the subject matter is, or what's going on in the plot, I go back and I read Pablo Neruda's poetry. I don't actually speak Spanish, so I read it translation. But I always go back to Neruda. I don't know why, but it calms me, calms my brain.
In the television age, the key distinction is between the candidate who can speak poetry and the one who can only speak prose.
Do-gooders are easily overlooked. We're supposed to be soft, touchy-feely types, who wear Birkenstocks, compost everything, and write poetry by candlelight.
Publishing a volume of verse is like dropping a rose petal down the Grand Canyon and waiting for the echo.
Writing a book of poetry is like dropping a rose petal down the Grand Canyon and waiting for the echo.
I was already writing poetry, so I transitioned from writing poetry a cappella to writing over beats, and it was way more exciting to me that way.
Without touching my subject I want to come to the moment when, through pure concentration of seeing, the composed picture becomes more made than taken. Without a descriptive caption to justify its existence, it will speak for itself - less descriptive, more creative; less informative, more suggestive - less prose, more poetry.
When I first started reading poetry, all the poets I read - Edgar Allan Poe, Oliver Wendell Holmes, John Greenleaf Whittier - were rhyme poets. That's what captured me.
Dylan captured what was on a million minds and turned it into poetry. With 'Blowin' in the Wind' or 'The Times They Are A-Changin',' he set a whole new standard.
The commonest error made in relation to poetry is that it consists simply in verse-making. Many confound the casket of meter and rhyme with the jewel of thought which it encloses, and, perhaps, in some instances, after close investigation, they have found the casket empty and turned away with feelings of disappointment and disgust.
I was raised on songs of poetry like Simon and Garfunkel and Cat Stevens and Neil Young, etc. I love those old songs probably the most because they hit me so deep down in my core.
I began to write poetry in high school, and would ride miles over sandy roads in the fine hills around Cedar Rapids, repeating the lines over and over until I had them right, making some of the rhythm of the horse help.
Look at Allen Ginsberg. In poems like 'Kaddish' and 'Howl,' you can hear a cantor between the lines. It's fully alive, and I think that's what's missing in modern poetry. It's too dry and cerebral.
When Auden said his poetry didn't save one Jew from the gas chamber, he'd said it all.
I never really liked poetry readings; I liked to read poetry by myself, but I liked singing, chanting my lyrics to this jazz group.
I felt like my favorite writers have almost musical hooks in their work, whether it's poetry or a hook at the end of a chapter that makes you want to read the next one. And I think that my favorite writers definitely have something musical about what they do, in saying something so relatable and universal and so simple.
Being able to say something lyrically, to say something that will do more than just be words, is really hard. It's easy to do when you're writing a chapter of a book or writing poetry, but it's really hard to do when you're confined to a melody line.
Much of the discussion around how people look at women focuses on culture, as if the media is entirely to blame. As if, without magazines and commenting hosts, we'd all suddenly dress in practical overalls and only judge a person on the quality of their charity work and poetry.
Rhyme, that enslaved queen, that supreme charm of our poetry, that creator of our meter.
