Robert Bringhurst Quotes

I still hope that more people can create art, even though artistic genres may never be the most popular or money-making genres. But the thing is, I think art is more long-lasting. It stays in people, and it changes them.

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

Everybody can write poetry, just like everybody knows how to make love.

I would feel dead if I didn't have the ability periodically to put my world in order with a poem. I think to be inarticulate is a great suffering, and is especially so to anyone who has a certain knack for poetry.

I started with poetry because it was direct, immediate, and short. It was the ecstasy of striking matches in the dark.

My 'must-have' was poetry. From the first, life meant that to me. And, fortunately, poetry is not purchasable material, but an atmosphere in which every life may expand. I found it everywhere about me.

I once taught art to adults in a night course. I had a woman who painted her back yard, and she said it was the first time she had ever really looked at it. I think everyone sees beauty. Art is a way to respond

Poetry can open locked chambers of possibiity, restore numbed zones to feeling, recharge desire.

My heart in passion, and my head on rhymes.

Joy is a part of my process. In fact, I'd go so far as to say that poetry, as a practice, necessitates a sense of joy. It's exhilarating to come into contact with the things we write into being. And a real sense of play and abandon – even when we are relying on hard-won technique, and even when the aim is deadly serious. How often do we get the excuse to stop, think, and then stop thinking altogether and try to listen to what sits behind our outside of our thoughts? Poets are lucky.

Poets of course are even more unpredictable than other writers, overwhelmed as they are by the moment they inhabit and finding it difficult to connect yesterday with tomorrow.

That's the real power of art, I think. Not to chide but to provoke challenge. Otherwise why bother?

There’s no preparation for poetry.

I don't think there's really any difference between art - or writing, or music - and magic. And I particularly draw the link between magic and writing. I think that they are profoundly connected.

Art and poetry cannot do without one another. Yet the two words are far from being synonymous. By Art I mean the creative or producing, work-making activity of the human mind. By Poetry I mean, not the particular art which consists in writing verses, but a process both more general and more primary: that intercommunication between the inner being of things and the inner being of the human Self which is a kind of divination (as was realized in ancient times; the Latin vates was both a poet and a diviner). Poetry, in this sense, is the secret life of each and all of the arts.

Writing is one way to achieve enchantment.

Poetry keeps longing alive.

Words, yes, formulating things, creating something from your heart, it is something very necessary, yes.

It all has to do with art - writing, painting, things I've done for a long time but just never had enough time to pursue. I have poetry - things that are designed for songs, but they're always poems first.

The creative act amazes me. Whether it's poetry, whether it's music, it's an amazing process, and it has something to do with bringing forth the old out into the world to create and to bring forth that which will rejuvenate.

I am always pleased to be asked to write a poem.

I write quite a lot of sonnets, and I think of them almost as prayers: short and memorable, something you can recite.

Poetry is the art which is technically within the grasp of everyone: a piece of paper and a pencil and one is ready.

Yes, I do often write poems from the mind, but I hope I don't ignore feelings and emotions.

I was a serious poet for quite a while and had little notebooks filled with poetry.