Poetic Experience Quotes

The character and history of each child may be a new and poetic experience to the parent, if he will let it.

Photography is not documentary, but intuition, a poetic experience.

One must read poetry with one's nerves.

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.

The experiment of poetry, as far as I am concerned, happens when the poem carries you beyond where you could have reasonably expected to go.

Introduction To Poetry I ask them to take a poem and hold it up to the light like a color slide or press an ear against its hive. I say drop a mouse into a poem and watch him probe his way out, or walk inside the poem's room and feel the walls for a light switch. I want them to waterski across the surface of a poem waving at the author's name on the shore. But all they want to do is tie the poem to a chair with rope and torture a confession out of it. They begin beating it with a hose to find out what it really means.

For me, fishing and journalism touched the same places in my head. In comparison with that of poets, the fly fishers' and the journalists' experiences are probably pale flavors, but they carry nonetheless a hint of ambrosia.

I feel often very close to the ecstasy and anguish which lie at the very heart of poetry - I am writing a lot.

Scientific understanding is often beautiful, a profoundly aesthetic experience which gives pleasure not unlike the reading of a great poem.

Poetry comes out of an elite experience, the experience of people whose ears are opened to the song of the universe.

Poetry isn't an activity, it's a way life is lived.

Reading [poetry], you know, is rather like opening the door to a horde of rebels who swarm out attacking one in twenty places at once - hit, roused, scraped, bared, swung through the air, so that life seems to flash by; then again blinded, knocked on the head - all of which are agreeable sensations for a reader (since nothing is more dismal than to open the door and get no response).

I rarely think of poetry as something I make happen; it is more accurate to say that it happens to me. Like a summer storm, a house afire, or the coincidence of both on the same day.

A poem gives me a chance to have an encounter with a feeling, with an experience, with a wish, with an idea.

The pleasure we feel, reading a poem, is our assurance of its integrity.

Poetry is a section of river-fog and moving boat-lights, delivered between bridges and whistles, so one says, 'Oh!' and another, 'How?'

I'm not responsible for my photographs. Photography is not documentary, but intuition, a poetic experience. It's drowning yourself, dissolving yourself, and then sniff, sniff, sniff - being sensitive to coincidence. You can't go looking for it; you can't want it, or you won't get it. First you must lose your self. Then it happens.

In my experience poetry speaks to you either at first sight or not at all. A flash of revelation and a flash of response. Like lightning. Like falling in love.

The finest poetry was first experience.

Reading poetry is an adventure in renewal, a creative act, a perpetual beginning, a rebirth of wonder.

Lamantia is faith building, encouraging poetry in that it abstractly hugs you by finally capturing the inexpressible. It's an experience similar to relief, reading his poems.

My advice to the reader approaching a poem is to make the mind still and blank. Let the poem speak. This charged quiet mimics the blank space ringing the printed poem, the nothing out of which something takes shape.

Often people, when they're confronted with a poem, it's like someone who keep saying 'what is the meaning of this? What is the meaning of this?' And that dulls us to the other pleasures poetry offers.

I do not go in search of poetry. I wait for poetry to visit me.