Anyone reading contemporary poetry - especially contemporary African-American poetry - will quickly see that race is an enduring subject. What some don't realize is just how diverse the handling of that subject is. It's as diverse as blackness.
— Terrance Hayes
The nerds are my favourite sort of boys - any guy with a passion - whether it be physics or film or writing or poetry even, I think it's super sweet and it's very attractive for a female.
— Teresa Palmer
I felt like my favorite writers have almost musical hooks in their work, whether it's poetry or a hook at the end of a chapter that makes you want to read the next one. And I think that my favorite writers definitely have something musical about what they do, in saying something so relatable and universal and so simple.
— Taylor Swift
If you've ever been to a poetry slam, you know that the highest scoring emotion is self-righteous indignation: how dare you judge me. So in that way, the poem, 'What Teachers Make,' is an absolutely formulaic slam poem designed to allow me to get up on my soap box and say, 'Let me tell you what really makes me angry.'
— Taylor Mali
If our hearts are ready for anything, we are touched by the beauty and poetry and mystery that fill our world.
— Tara Brach
I think going from doing TV and straight plays to Shakespeare is weird enough because you have this heightened language, and you are telling a story through metric poetry. But I think music is that place beyond poetry.
— Tamsin Greig
I came to poetry through the urgent need to denounce injustice, exploitation, humiliation. I know that's not enough to change the world. But to remain silent would have been a kind of intolerable complicity.
— Tahar Ben Jelloun
For me, poetry is a situation - a state of being, a way of facing life and facing history.
The business of the poet is not to find new emotions, but to use the ordinary ones and, in working them up into poetry, to express feelings which are not in actual emotions at all.
— T. S. Eliot
Poetry should help, not only to refine the language of the time, but to prevent it from changing too rapidly.
Poetry is not a turning loose of emotion, but an escape from emotion; it is not the expression of personality, but an escape from personality. But, of course, only those who have personality and emotions know what it means to want to escape from these things.
Poetry at its best can do you a lot of harm.
— Sylvia Plath
I used to buy scented poetry books on tour and read aloud to the band. Not what you'd expect, huh?
— Suzi Quatro
I've never written poetry. I'm not a poet, but I think the nearest you get is either the short story or the novella, in that you can't waste a word. There is no hiding place: everything's got to be seen to relate, and the prose counts.
— Susan Hill
Poetry is its own medium; it's very different than writing prose. Poetry can talk in an imagistic sense, it has particular ways of catching an environment.
— Story Musgrave
I thought it would be a funny concept to publish a book about stand-up comedy with Faber, the poetry publisher, and to apply to stand-up the same sort of weight of annotation that you would to a classic work of literature, an epic poem. I thought that would be funny.
— Stewart Lee
I was reading the dictionary. I thought it was a poem about everything.
— Steven Wright
So the best way to understand poetry, which is made by men, is to imitate, and that goes back to making work as a kind of doorway into new work, as opposed to making work as a mirror of the old work.
Lyrical poetry is not a big part of most people's lives. Twitter now becomes an interesting way of getting cared for language into people's space. Because there is something deep inside of us that responds to cared for language, whether it's literary, poetry, or really good lyrics in a song.
— Teju Cole
Poetry and lyrics are very similar. Making words bounce off a page.
I have been writing poetry since 1975. My first poetry book was published in 1986.
— Taslima Nasrin
My first book was poetry, but I didn't write it first. I wrote it third. So my first two books were prose.
— Tao Lin
My father is a visual artist, so I was influenced by him, and my mother is an English teacher who forced me to read a lot of books and poetry and get involved in theatre. I developed a varied taste for different arts.
— Taika Waititi
Poetry is a form of mathematics, a highly rigorous relationship with words.
Real friendship, like real poetry, is extremely rare - and precious as a pearl.
Genuine poetry can communicate before it is understood.
As things are, and as fundamentally they must always be, poetry is not a career, but a mug's game. No honest poet can ever feel quite sure of the permanent value of what he has written: He may have wasted his time and messed up his life for nothing.
I have felt great advances in my poetry, the main one being a growing victory over word nuances and a superfluity of adjectives.
Poetry, I feel, is a tyrannical discipline. You've got to go so far so fast in such a small space; you've got to burn away all the peripherals.
I like to give and get basically anything (I love to read) but especially fiction and poetry.
— Suzan-Lori Parks
I read usually in the morning, in my kitchen at breakfast - a short reading time, usually poetry. I read in bed every night. I usually get in bed pretty early with a book, and I read until I can't prop my eyes open anymore - sometimes rather late.
— Sue Monk Kidd
I've already written 300 space poems. But I look upon my ultimate form as being a poetic prose. When you read it, it appears to be prose, but within the prose you have embedded the techniques of poetry.
All poetry has to do is to make a strong communication. All the poet has to do is listen. The poet is not an important fellow. There will also be another poet.
— Stevie Smith
Ever since I was a kid, I've always been interested in the poetry of melancholy, if you like.
— Steven Wilson
When I applied for grad school, I did not specify genre. I said I wanted an MFA in Creative Writing. I was so cute and stupid! The admissions committee at Pitt decided to put me in poetry.
When I hit a block, regardless of what I am writing, what the subject matter is, or what's going on in the plot, I go back and I read Pablo Neruda's poetry. I don't actually speak Spanish, so I read it translation. But I always go back to Neruda. I don't know why, but it calms me, calms my brain.
— Tea Obreht
I really enjoy English and poetry and writing classes.
— Taylor Momsen
I'm no longer religious, but the Bible fascinates me. Hardly anyone reads it anymore, but it's got everything: it's a book of poetry, it's a book of principle, it's a book of stories, and of myths and of epic tales, a book of histories and a book of fictions, of riddles, fables, parables and allegories.
— Tara Westover
When I got to Scotland, I signed up on a site called Meetup. It's like these group things you can do - a poetry reading, a hike, whatever.
— Tanya Saracho
I remember how as I kid I would love stories of every kind - whether they were narrated in school or what I read in books. Storytelling would always appeal to me, I would take part in poetry reciting, dramatics, choreography and debates. There was this fascination for performance, which finally culminated in a professional sphere.
— Tahir Raj Bhasin
Poetry is not only a set of words which are chosen to relate to each other; it is something which goes much further than that to provide a glimpse of our vision of the world.
I didn't start off as a journalist; I started off as a poet. My ambition was to practise poetry. Then I found journalism, but that other voice never fled from me.
— Ta-Nehisi Coates
Immature poets imitate; mature poets steal.
Poetry may make us from time to time a little more aware of the deeper, unnamed feelings which form the substratum of our being, to which we rarely penetrate; for our lives are mostly a constant evasion of ourselves.
I saw the gooseflesh on my skin. I did not know what made it. I was not cold. Had a ghost passed over? No, it was the poetry.
The blood jet is poetry and there is no stopping it.
The length and shape of the poemetto, like the greater Romantic lyric of English poetry, lends itself to retrospection and commentary.
— Susan Stewart
Country music especially can get very formulaic - you know, you have to have your verses and a bridge and a chorus, and a lot of the songs are written as just plain and simple poetry on the road.
— Sturgill Simpson
When you're looking that far out, you're giving people their place in the universe, it touches people. Science is often visual, so it doesn't need translation. It's like poetry, it touches you.
I don't think Auden liked my poetry very much, he's very Anglican.
