Terence McKenna Quotes

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

The drama is complete poetry. The ode and the epic contain it only in germ; it contains both of them in a state of high development, and epitomizes both.

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

No more pronouncements on lousy verse. No more hidden competition. No more struggling not to be a square.

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.

Nobody does animation better than Disney; it's just that some of us wanted out of the box. Burton was one. I was another. We were the mutual complaint society.

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

I do think that all of us think in poems.

Even a polemic has some justification if one considers that my own first poetic experiments began during a dictatorship and mark the origin of the Hermetic movement.

The arts generally have had to recognize Modernism - how should poetry escape?

When the modern movement began, starting perhaps with the paintings of Manet and the poetry of Baudelaire and Rimbaud, what distinguished the modern movement was the enormous honesty that writers, painters and playwrights displayed about themselves. The bourgeois novel flinches from such notions.

A poem is bound by language, but a poetics is not.

I like art. It's another way to rebel.

I think poetry is as old as language, and both come out of the same thing - an effort to try to express something that is inexpressible.

A lot of my activity in the theatre, and even in writing poems, was a kind of retrospective aggro on the English teacher who wouldn't allow me to read poetry aloud.

Everyone was saying computers were going to be the future of art; everyone had to do something in this medium. And it was almost some sort of rebellion that I wanted to do these small, intimate drawings.

It was through poetry I learned just to appreciate my own voice and to not think of my voice in terms of what it needs to be able to do, but what it can do.

Bohemia isn't somewhere an artist runs to escape society. It's a place where like-minded artists gather to plot the downfall of dogma and ignorance.

An artist must be a reactionary. He has to stand out against the tenor of the age and not go flopping along.

I think all poets must feel this: that there is constantly something new to be discovered in the language. It's like a thrilling encounter, and you can find things.

I really came to literature through poetry.

The artist, and particularly the poet, is always an anarchist in the best sense of the word. He must heed only the call that arises within him from three strong voices: the voice of death, with all its foreboding, the voice of love and the voice of art.

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

If a poet interprets a poem of his own he limits its suggestibility.

Prince or commoner, tenor or bass, Painter or plumber or never-do-well, Do me a favor and shut your face - Poets alone should kiss and tell.