Poetic Roots Quotes

I always wrote poems when I was a little girl, and I loved hip hop music, and I kind of just started writing poems over beats, and that's when I started rapping.

The rudiment of verse may, possibly, be found in the spondee.

What made me a comedian was that I wasn't really a songwriter, I was more of a poet.

I think that were beginning to remember that the first poets didn't come out of a classroom, that poetry began when somebody walked off of a savanna or out of a cave and looked up at the sky with wonder and said, "Ahhh." That was the first poem.

So I really began as a failed poet - although when I first wanted to be a writer, I learned to write prose by reading poetry.

When I started writing poetry, it was always in very hip-hop influenced spaces: Someone would teach a Nas song side-by-side with a Gwendolyn Brooks poem, and we'd talk about the connections between those things.

The trouble with the performance poets is that they don't seem to have read anything. So there is not a real sense of the poetic tradition in their work.

I didn't learn much about writing at Sarah Lawrence, but I learned a lot about the sources of poems - dreams, myth, history - from the really great teachers, Joseph Campbell, Charles Trinkhaus, Bert Loewenberg, and a young Australian anthropologist named Harry Hawthorne.

The finest poetry was first experience.

Poetry carries its history within it, and it is oral in origin. Its transmission was oral.

I was writing poetry, and the Mountain Goats was an outgrowth of that.

I've always been a poet. My dad went to Lincoln University with Gil-Scott Heron, so I came out of the womb listening to Gil-Scott Heron.

Modern poetry, for me, began not in English at all but in Spanish, in the poems of Lorca.

I was writing poems when I was young, you know, because my father was a poet, so it was absolutely normal to follow my father.

I would come to understand there is no poem separable from its source. I began to see that poems are not just an individual florescence. They are also a vast root system growing down into ideas and understandings. Almost unbidden, they tap into the history and evolution of art and language.

The language of the Catholic Church - the liturgy, the prayer, the gospels - was in many ways my first poetry.

There's a fierce practicality and empiricism which the whole imaginative, lyrical aspect of poetry comes from.

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

The sentences I write have their roots in song and poetry, and take their bearings from music and painting, as much as from the need to impart mere information, or mirror anything. I am not a realist writer, even if I seem like one.

I believe in rooting poems in actual places, even if you move into some other extraordinary realm.