Poetic Connection Quotes

I think the pleasure of form is that you have a companion with you besides all the poetry you have ever read.

The idea of how to read a poem is based on the idea that poetry needs you as a reader. That the experience of poetry, the meaning in poetry, is a kind of circuit that takes place between a poet, a poem and a reader, and that meaning doesn't exist or inhere in poems alone.

[Children] use up the same part of my head as poetry does. To deal with children is a matter of terrific imaginative identification. And the children have to come first. It's no use putting off their evening meal for two months.

I think the artistic side of architecture was natural to me. My mother was an artist and a poet.

When I go to the shore, I take along the poems of Pablo Neruda. I suppose it's because the poems are simultaneously lush and ripe and kind of lazy, yet throbbing with life - like summer itself.

There is some awe mixed with the joy of our surprise, when this poet, who lived in some past world, two or three hundred years ago, says that which lies close to my own soul, that which I also had wellnigh thought and said.

In contrast to a dream a reverie cannot be recounted. To be communicated, it must be written, written with emotion and taste, being relived all the more strongly because it is being written down. Here, we are touching the realm of written love. It is going out of fashion, but the benefits remain. There are still souls for whom love is the contact of two poetries, the fusion of two reveries.

The poet is a brother speaking to a brother of "a moment of their other lives" - a moment that had been buried beneath the dust of the busy world.

He who touches the soil of Manhattan and the pavement of New York, touches, whenever he knows or not, Walt Whitman.

Of course a poem is a two-way street. No poem is any good if it doesn't suggest to the reader things from his own mind and recollection that he will read into it, and will add to what the poet has suggested. But I do think poetry readings are very important.

I always knew in my heart Walt Whitman's mind to be more like my own than any other man's living.

You will be hard pressed to read another book that understands you as well as 'Leaves of Grass' does. It was made for you in the way that the constellations were made for you. It understands and makes space for your doubts, your love, the guilt and passions of your life and waits for you.

I saw [Allen Ginsberg] more as an old man who liked poetry and who had a lot of physical and emotional problems. We liked our time together.

I am inclined to believe that some music, like certain poetry, finds its appeal and way to all.

The collective love for music and poetry and just the brotherhood of sound. And it's still kind of flowing through me and I attribute that to the team.

I am particularly conscious of my connection to the poets of the Harlem Renaissance because I, too, am a Black poet, born into, and shaped by, the very community in which those poets of the past produced so much of the work we associate with the Harlem Renaissance. We speak from the same place, both literally and metaphorically.

Poetry says the things that I can't say. I read a lot, but I never write it.

By writing... in the language of his society, a poet takes a large step toward it. It is society's job to meet him halfway, that is, to open his book and read it.

Every contemporary poet is a door to another poet.

Stadium rock and commercial rock are the opposite of what poetry needs. An audience of around 200 is ideal for poetry.

I would go to the store, I would buy cassette tapes, and I would read the liner notes and sort of subconsciously creating the connections between the rappers that I was reading and the poets that they were teaching us in school.

T.S. Eliot was one of the first poets introduced to me when I started studying literature and has felt like a close friend ever since. No one nails urban despair quite like Eliot.

It just happens to be that people like to associate poetry and rap music. I think that idea is kind of corny.

But when the fairy sang the whole world listened to him. Stephen felt clouds pause in their passing; he felt sleeping hills shift and murmur; he felt cold mists dance. He understood for the first time that the world is not dumb at all, but merely waiting for someone to speak to it in a language it understands. In the fairy’s song the earth recognized the names by which it called itself.

The proof of a poet is that his country absorbs him as affectionately as he has absorbed it.