Aleksandar Hemon Quotes

I really came to literature through poetry.

Poetry -- even bad poetry -- may be our final hope.

It's not easy to define poetry.

We recognise in the finished art, which is the result of these conditions, the best words in the best order - poetry; and to put this essential poetry into different classes is impossible.

I work on words, mostly, toward them being poetry or short stories, and then some of those become songs.

My own verse is usually free verse. The freer the better.

That complete statement which is literature.

Poetry is not a turning loose of emotion, but an escape from emotion.

Poetry is a satifying of the desire for resemblance.

I don't think there's any essential difference, at least for me, between writing poetry and writing prose.

When I really want to be soothed and reminded of why people bother to fiddle with sentences, I often read poetry.

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

Poetry is, first and last, language - the rest is filler.

Poets deal in writing about feelings and trying to find the language and images for intense feelings.

Poetry is truth in its Sunday clothes.

I write all the time - I write poetry, I love to write.

Translation is an interestingly different way to be involved both with poetry and with the language that I've found myself living in much of the time. I think the two feed each other.

While I've had a great distaste for what's usually called song in modern poetry or for what's usually called music, I really don't think of speech as so far from song.

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.

During the '70s I was interested in words and meaning as a way of making art.

I'm a poet, and I spent my life in poetry.

I am not at all clear what free verse is anymore. That's one of the things you learn not to know.

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.

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.

To sing a song is quite different than to write a poem. I'm not and never will be a novelist, but to write a novel is not the same thing as writing a play. There is a difference in form, but essentially what you're after is the same thing.