Kevin Powers Quotes

I started writing poetry in high school because I wanted desperately to write, but somehow, writing stories didn't appeal to me, and I loved the flow and the feel and sense of poetry, especially that of what one might call formal verse.

A prose writer gets tired of writing prose, and wants to be a poet. So he begins every line with a capital letter, and keeps on writing prose.

Prose cannot compete with the economy of poetry, the ability to have a full artistic experience in a short period of time.

It's not easy to define poetry.

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

Prose is like this big block - you write big paragraphs. I feel that when I'm reading and writing, that a prose book is kind of monolithic. But a song is more like a feather or something.

I'm a failed poet. Reading poetry helps me to see the world differently, and I try to infuse my prose with figurative language, which goes against the trend in fiction.

I am a poet, and I speak poetically.

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

For poets today or in any age, the choice is not between freedom on the one hand and abstruse French forms on the other. The choice is between the nullity and vanity of our first efforts, and the developing of a sense of idiom, form, structure, metre, rhythm, line - all the fundamental characteristics of this verbal art.

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.

There is poetry even in prose, in all the great prose which is not merely utilitarian or didactic: there exist poets who write in prose or at least in more or less apparent prose; millions of poets write verses which have no connection with poetry.

I really enjoy English and poetry and writing classes.

I love form, but I'm not interested in forms. I've never written a sonnet or villanelle or sestina or any of that. For me, it's a kind of line. It's a rhythm. It's something musical.

I read mostly poetry.

Poetry is all nouns and verbs.

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.

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

You don't make a poem with ideas, but with words.

With me it's the whole thing, it's the conceit, the idea, what the poem is saying. And it goes on just as long as is necessary to say what needs to be said.

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

If you like the precision and concision of poetry, a page of prose is unsatisfying in a certain way. And poetry is so direct.

People used to say poems were different to songs but I don't think they are.

The object of poetic activity is essentially language: whatever his beliefs and convictions, the poet is more concerned with words than with what these words designate.