Leonard Cohen Quotes

I think poetry, rather than suffering, is more and more sufficient to the needs of our society. It's one of the reasons so much of it is, for want of a better term, 'surreal.'

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

A poem records emotions and moods that lie beyond normal language, that can only be patched together and hinted at metaphorically.

All poetry is an ordered voice, one which tries to tell you about a vision in the un-visionary language of farm, city, and love.

I'm a very conceptual writer.

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.

Poetry is one of the destinies of speech... One would say that the poetic image, in its newness, opens a future to language.

My work should be seen as poetry.

Whereas if you were writing an op-ed piece or an essay, somebody would be asking, "What's your point?" With poetry you can stay in a moment for as long as you want. Poetry is about metaphor, about a thing standing in for something else. It's the thing that opens out to something else. What that something else is changes for readers. So what's on the page - it falls away.

Poetry is the arithmetic of the easiest way and the primrose path, matched up with foam-flanked horses, bloody knuckles, and bones, on the hard ways to the stars.

Every poem is a coat of arms. It must be deciphered. How much blood, how many tears in exchange for these axes, these muzzles, these unicorns, these torches, these towers, these martlets, these seedlings of stars and these fields of blue!

We often find far more power in a symbol than in something that is an an actuality.

I first got caught up in this marvelous feeling of being spoken to in that very direct, private, magical way by a poem when I was really young. I was in grade school and had found an Emily Dickinson poem in a textbook.

I think poetry is able to say things in such a small, perfect way that are so hard to say. I think it's a perfect medium for expressing difficult ideas and concepts and feelings. It's one of my great loves.

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.

Ray Bradbury taught me the importance of metaphor and simile and poetic style.

I've always loved color because it's a little bit like music. I love that it seems to be both physical and ephemeral and engages us as a metaphor for our feeling lives.

I think poetry is a fabulous medium to encapsulate thoughts far more precisely than prose.

I guess I have a weird habit of writing body part metaphors.

I don't ever get too literal.

I like absurdist aesthetics. There's something about dream logic that's really fascinating, how it interweaves with narrative.

In terms of smaller changes over time, I think good plays are like poems. Every syllable counts. So I wrestle with word choice, rhythm in final drafts.

Poems are not read: they are reread. Reread the poem, then read between the lines, then look at it, then watch it, then peek at it: handle it like an object. Contemplate its shadows, angles and dimensions.

I was lucky to have read a lot of poetry when I was younger; it helped me to remember a way to write.

I've hated poetry ever since I was at school. I include Shakespeare in that. I don't understand the obsession with him!