Jayne Anne Phillips Quotes

Poetry is not a matter of feelings, it is a matter of language. It is language which creates feelings.

Poetry teaches us music, metaphor, condensation and specificity.

Poetry is the most subtle of the literary arts, and students grow more ingenious by the year at avoiding it. If they can nip around Milton, duck under Blake and collapse gratefully into the arms of Jane Austen, a lot of them will.

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.

If we ask a vague question, such as, 'What is poetry?' we expect a vague answer, such as, 'Poetry is the music of words,' or 'Poetry is the linguistic correction of disorder.'

There's one of my new poems actually - is a good example of where my poetry has ended up. My earlier river poetry was more like a cross between Shelley and Dylan Thomas.

I've already written 300 space poems. But I look upon my ultimate form as being a poetic prose. When you read it, it appears to be prose, but within the prose you have embedded the techniques of poetry.

Poetry; a criticism of life under the conditions fixed for such a criticism by the laws of poetic truth and poetic beauty.

I was 15 when I first became deeply touched by the rhythm and structure of words.

Poetry: the best words in the best order.

I didn't want to deal in poetry. I got rid of that after a few months.

Poetry seems to be the only weapon able to beat language, using language's own means.

I write the occasional poem. I think my dabbling in poetry makes me better at screenplays. Poetry teaches the value of condensing, the importance of talking in a few words.

Poetry, first and foremost, is the lyric. It's the music.

Slowly poetry becomes visual because it paints images, but it is also musical: it unites two arts into one.

But poetry is my life. Poetry is what matters to me.

I do not think of literature as something confessional or therapeutic. I make sentences in order to be precise about experiences and things. I am urged by many things and no things in particular.

Poetry is a beautiful way of spoiling prose, and the laborious art of exchanging plain sense for harmony.

I like rhyme because it is memorable, I like form because having to work to a pattern gives me original ideas.

Poetry, I think, intensifies the reader's experience. If it's a humorous facet of the story, poetry makes it more exuberant. If it's a sad facet, poetry can make it more poignant.

But I can't and don't ever want to write bell-yanking confetti-tossing hat-throwing poems.

Let my life as Poet begin. I want the life of the Poet. I have labored for over twelve years, one thousand pages of prose. Now, I want the easiness of poetry. The brevity of the poem.

Poetry is simply the most beautiful, impressive, and widely effective mode of saying things.

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.