Samuel R. Delany Quotes

poetry is where the language is renewed.

A poet's work consists less in seeking words for his ideas than in seeking ideas for his words and predominant rhythms.

When I really want to be soothed and reminded of why people bother to fiddle with sentences, I often read poetry.

Poetry is language at its most distilled and most powerful.

We all write poems; it is simply that poets are the ones who write in words.

I can recite poetry, but I cannot write it.

Because people are very interested in my poetry, in what I say.

I love writing. I love the swirl and swing of words as they tangle with human emotions.

I always thought of words as art supplies.

I've written poetry most of my life.

You can say anything you want, yessir, but it's the words that sing, they soar and descend...I bow to them...I love them, I cling to them, I run them down, I bite into them, I melt them down...I love words so much...The unexpected ones...The ones I wait for greedily or stalk until, suddenly, they drop.

Poetry is an art practiced with the terribly plastic material of human language.

Poetry is essentially the discovery, the love, the passion for the name of everything.

Poetry is the honey of all flowers, the quintessence of all sciences, the marrow of wit, and the very phrase of angels.

One day while studying a Yeats poem I decided to write poetry the rest of my life. I recognized that a single short poem has room for history, music, psychology, religious thought, mood, occult speculation, character, and events of one's own life. I still feel surprised that such various substances can find shelter and nourishment in a poem. A poem in fact may be a sort of nourishing liquid, such as one uses to keep an amoeba alive. If prepared right, a poem can keep an image or a thought or insights on history or the psyche alive for years, as well as our desires and airy impulses.

This is the gift all writers seek-to write language that incandesces yet does not melt.

There's never been a culture without poetry in the history of the world. In every culture, in every language there is expressive play, expressive word play, there's language use to different purposes that we would call poetry.

Poetry is a peerless proficiency of the imagination.

I haven't written poetry in a long time but I read it and I miss it. It is so hard to write. So hard to finish, so hard to find the exact word to make it shine. In honor of my youth I will write a poem to finish this essay. It is spring in the Ozark Mountains. The yellow flowers are blooming and the birds wake me at dawn and last night five planets lined up by the moon in the western sky. If that doesn't inspire me to poetry what will?

POETRY, n. A form of expression peculiar to the Land beyond the Magazines.

The three ingredients of poetry: the mystery of the universe, spiritual curiosity, the energy of language.

I don't think poetry will die, but I think that poetry does demand a certain kind of attention to language.

So all my best is dressing old words new.

What makes poetry? A full heart, brimful of one noble passion.

The poet's, commonly, is not a logger's path, but a woodman's. The logger and pioneer have preceded him, like John the Baptist; eaten the wild honey, it may be, but the locusts also; banished decaying wood and the spongy mosses which feed on it, and built hearths and humanized Nature for him.