Tracy K. Smith Quotes

I use not casual phrases but imagistic phrases that create a rhythm of natural presence.

I like poems that are complex.

Jigging veins of rhyming mother wits.

Well, the great thing for me about poetry is that in good poems the dislocation of words, that is to say, the distance between what they say they're saying and what they are actually saying is at its greatest.

And, I mean, I think poetry does need to be met to some extent, especially, I guess, 19th century poetry, and for me, it's just been so worth the effort. It's like I'm planting a garden in my head.

Emily Dickinson has great sound and sense.

Poetry has the ability to create entire moments with just a few choice words. The spacing and line breaks create rhythm, a helpful musicality, a natural flow. The separate stanzas aid in perpetuating a kind of incremental reading, one small chunk at a time.

I come from an era where lyrics were full of imagery and metaphor, and that's all I know. I think people miss that.

To approach a poem as if it is a puzzle to be understood is to miss the point.

It is very difficult to explain poetry. You have to understand the poetry and figure out your own take and your relatability.

Poetry is something I love to do. Good poetry has an amazing ability to be communicative before it's even understood. I get emotional just from the beauty of words.

Once we start hitting lyrical themes that can whack you from all these different perspectives, we know we're onto something special.

Twittering and blogging and all that is fine, but there is no idea of how to phrase something beautifully; how to use language to create an emotion. It's just passing information and sometimes very superficial information.

The lines of poetry, the period of prose, and even the texts of Scripture most frequently recollected and quoted, are those which are felt to be preeminently musical.

When you translate poetry in particular, you're obliged to look at how the writer with whom you're working puts together words, sentences, phrases, the triple tension between the line of verse, the syntax and the sentence.

Many of today's verses are prose and bad prose.

My writing style is very sensual, as in sensory detail.

Poetry consists in a rhyming dictionary and things seen.

You know, people speak in poetry all the time. They just don't realize it.

Prose is all about embellishing and describing.

I love to create interesting textures with language. You can do it as long as it seems like a discovery.

In high school I was very much involved in poetry. You cannot read a poem quickly. There's too much going on there. There are rhythms and alliterations. You have to read poetry slow, slow, slow to absorb it all.

Lapped in poetry, wrapped in the picturesque, armed with logical sentences and inalienable words.

Prose on certain occasions can bear a great deal of poetry; on the other hand, poetry sinks and swoons under a moderate weight of prose.

I like poems that are little games.