Tracy K. Smith Quotes

Jigging veins of rhyming mother wits.

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.

In poetry, you must love the words, the ideas and the images and rhythms with all your capacity to love anything at all.

I like poems that are little games.

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.

The poetic act consists of suddenly seeing that an idea splits up into a number of equal motifs and of grouping them; they rhyme.

Emily Dickinson has great sound and sense.

Poetry is of so subtle a spirit, that in the pouring out of one language into another it will evaporate.

I often say poetry was my first love.

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

I like bringing my poet brain and sensibility to lyrics I write.

Well you can't teach the poetry, but you can teach the craft.

The poetry from the eighteenth century was prose; the prose from the seventeenth century was poetry.

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.

I think when kids just see well-crafted poetry, it's just obtuse to them. It's hard to relate to.

Poetry consists in a rhyming dictionary and things seen.

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

I couldn't believe verse was supposed to be hard. It was a snap for me. I loved Shakespeare.

When critics are waiting to pounce upon poetic style on exactly the same grounds as if it were prose, the poets tremble.

I'm a very conceptual writer.

You take stuff from different places, and sometimes you stick a line in because it rhymes, not because it makes sense.

I don't think it's always good to read lots of poetry.

I've read some of your modern free verse and wonder who set it free.

Don't call my lyrics poetry. It's an insult to real poets.