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.
In the French language, there is a great gulf between prose and poetry; in English, there is hardly any difference. It is a splendid privilege of the great literary languages Greek, Latin, and French that they possess a prose. English has not this privilege. There is no prose in English.
When I arrived at Columbia, I gave up acting and became interested in all things French. French poetry, French history, French literature.
In college, I was a huge fan of 'Les Miserables.' I seem to remember that people who were into French literature preferred Hugo's poetry.
I do not see how a man can work on the frontiers of physics and write poetry at the same time. They are in opposition.
As things are, and as fundamentally they must always be, poetry is not a career, but a mug's game. No honest poet can ever feel quite sure of the permanent value of what he has written: He may have wasted his time and messed up his life for nothing.
Poetry is how I feed the soul, and it's how I fire the furnace of writing.
I think the poetry that came out of Belfast, and especially the Queen's University set, in the 1970s and '80s - you know, Paul Muldoon and Seamus Heaney, Derek Mahon and Ciaran Carson - that was probably the finest body of work since the Gaelic renaissance, up there with the work of Yeats and Synge and Lady Gregory.
A true poet does not bother to be poetical. Nor does a nursery gardener scent his roses.
She was the Judy Garland of American poetry.
The poetry you read has been written for you, each of you - black, white, Hispanic, man, woman, gay, straight.
How does one happen to write a poem: where does it come from? That is the question asked by the psychologists or the geneticists of poetry.
All bad poetry springs from genuine feeling.
Everything one invents is true, you may be perfectly sure of that. Poetry is as precise as geometry.
All one's inventions are true, you can be sure of that. Poetry is as exact a science as geometry.
Poetry is as precise a thing as geometry.
Have you ever heard a good joke? If you've ever heard someone just right, with the right pacing, then you're already on the way to poetry. It's about using words in very precise ways and using gesture.
I saw the gooseflesh on my skin. I did not know what made it. I was not cold. Had a ghost passed over? No, it was the poetry.
I didn't know until later, but my uncle was quite a famous bohemian in Glasgow, and he played guitar. My father was a kind of a poetic bohemian, and he read me poetry.
Poetry is a phantom script telling how rainbows are made and why they go away.
