Natasha Trethewey Quotes

I think I felt at some point that I couldn't understand poetry or that it was beyond me or it didn't speak to my experience. I think that was because I hadn't yet found the right poems to invite me in.

So it is in poetry. All we ask is that the mood recorded shall impress us as having been of the kind that exhausts the imaginative capacity; if it fails to do this the failure will announce itself either in prose or in insignificant verse.

I think people turn to poetry more often than they think they do, or encounter it in more ways than they think that they do. I think we forget the places that we encounter it, say, in songs or in other little bits and pieces of things that we may have remembered from childhood.

Genuine poetry can communicate before it is understood.

Even though I am the daughter of a poet, and my stepmother is also a poet, growing up, I didn't think I could understand poetry; I didn't think that it had any relevance to my life, the feelings that I endured on a day-to-day basis, until I was introduced to the right poem.

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

I find a lot of poetry very disappointing, but I do have poets that I go back to. One book of poetry that I'd like to mention is 'The Exchange' by Sophie Cabot Black. Her poems are difficult without being too difficult.

The number of people who read a poem is not as important as how the poem affects those who read it.

I love poetry and I've kept everything I've written.

I would hope that people, no matter what age, would find something to identify with in my books, pick one up and experience a personal sense of discovery. That's great. But for them, not for me.

Poetry is what makes my toenails twinkle.

A good poem is like a bouillon cube. It's concentrated and it nourishes you when you need it.

poetry is where the language is renewed.

The glory of a good tale is that it is limitless and fluid; a good tale belongs to each reader in its own particular way.

The poet should touch our heart by showing his own

When words become a poem, it makes sense to me, but I don't know how to explain to someone why the words are the way they are. It's just the logic of the poem to me.

Every book has a soul, the soul of the person who wrote it and the soul of those who read it and dream about it.

You will never be alone with a poet in your pocket.

[Kurt] Vonnegut was a writer whose great gift was that he always seemed to be talking directly to you. He wasn't writing, he wasn't showing off, he was just telling you, nobody else, what it was like, what it was all about. That intimacy made him beloved. We can admire the art of John Updike or Philip Roth, but we love Vonnegut.

Poetry is the work of the bard and of the people who inspire him.

Nikki Giovanni! I got a book of hers from the library, and there was this woman who could paint me on paper with words - my whole little experience. I thought it was wonderful.

A poem is energy transferred from where the poet got it (he will have some several causations), by way of the poem itself to, all the way over to, the reader.

If I begin writing a poem that means I'm intrigued in some way by whatever it's about and that if I'm not trying to find something new and pushing the envelope in the poem I can't expect my reader to be particularly excited about it either.

Poetry is a sort of truancy, a dream within the dream of life, a wild flower planted among our wheat.