Elizabeth Smart Quotes

Poetry has become the higher algebra of metaphors.

Poetry is the journal of the sea animal living on land, wanting to fly in the air. Poetry is a search for syllables to shoot at the barriers of the unknown and the unknowable. Poetry is a phantom script telling how rainbows are made and why they go away.

Well, I like to write poetry. I'm a published poet.

Anyone who holds a pen these days thinks he or she is a poet.

When it comes to poetry, I think partly the numbers of people attempting to write poems is probably a result or the reaction to technology.

A lot of innovation in language comes from poetry.

The ability to name poetry's gestures and rhetorics isn't required to write or read them, any more than a painter needs to know the physics of color to bring forward a landscape. The eye and hand and ear know what they need to know. Some of us want to know more, because knowing pleases.

I believe poetry has very little to do with memory.

We all write poems; it is simply that poets are the ones who write in words.

There's a level at which, if you take poetry seriously, the focus it involves... that never goes away.

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

Usually a life turned into a poem is misrepresented.

I read mostly poetry.

Poetry is always slightly mysterious, and you wonder what is your relationship to it.

I am always coming up with architectural metaphors when I think about writing. But I think one of the things that draw us to literature is that it gives us this very attractive illusion that there is meaning in the world - things connect.

My next project is to get back to that. Actually, to learn how to write poetry. I'm not kidding.

In fact, in lyric poetry, truthfulness becomes recognizable as a ring of truth within the medium itself.

Poetry is the key to the hieroglyphics of nature.

For better or worse, poetry is my life.

Poetry is music though, unfortunately, not all music is poetry. Because music has other carriers to take its message - beats, lyrics, singers, bass players - anyone in music can rise to make a major statement but in poetry there are only words to do the work. And they do sometimes have to sweat.

Poetry is the mathematics of writing and closely kin to music.

I find I cannot exist without Poetry

Like a piece of ice on a hot stove the poem must ride on its own melting.

Poems don't have to rhyme... Poems are about beauty and emotion; in other words poems are about feelings.

Sir, what is poetry? Why, Sir, it is much easier to say what it is not. We all know what light is; but it is not easy to tell what it is.