#poet

The musician - if he be a good one - finds his own perception prompted by the poet's perception, and he translates the expression of that perception from the terms of poetry into the terms of music. ↗

— John Drinkwater

#finds #good #his #into #music

Poetry is language at its most distilled and most powerful. ↗

— Rita Dove

#distilled #language #most #most powerful #powerful

Have you ever heard a good joke? If you've ever heard someone just right, with the right pacing, then you're already on the way to poetry. It's about using words in very precise ways and using gesture. ↗

— Rita Dove

#already #ever #gesture #good #heard

I was apprehensive. I feared every time I talked about poetry, it would be filtered through the lens of race, sex, and age. ↗

— Rita Dove

#age #apprehensive #every #every time #feared

My favorite poets may not be your bread and butter. I have more favorite poems than favorite poets. ↗

— Rita Dove

#butter #favorite #i #may #more

There are distinct duties of a poet laureate. I plan a reading series at the Library of Congress and advise the librarian. The rest is how I want to promote poetry. ↗

— Rita Dove

#congress #distinct #duties #how #i

I have learned so much from working with other poets, travelling and reading with them, spending days discussing poems in progress. There is the sense that we are all, as writers, part of something which is more powerful than any of us. ↗

— Helen Dunmore

#days #discussing #i #i have learned #learned

As she bends for a Kleenex in the dark, I am thinking of other girls: the girl I loved who fell in love with a lion--she lost her head over it--we just necked a lot; of the girl who fell in love with the tightrope, got addicted to getting high wired and nothing else was enough; all the beautiful, damaged women who have come through my life and I wonder what would have happened if I'd met them sooner, what they were like before they were so badly wounded. All this time I thought I'd been kissing, but maybe I'm always doing mouth-to-mouth resuscitation, kissing dead girls in hopes that the heart will start again. Where there's breath, I've heard, there's hope. ↗

— Daphne Gottlieb

#poetry #women #beauty

All of these teeth had once been in real, live people. They had talked and smiled and eaten and sang and cursed and prayed. They had brushed and flossed and died. In English class, we read poems about death, but here, right in front of me was a poem about death too. ↗

— Gabrielle Zevin

#evidence #poetry #teeth #death

There are certain things in which mediocrity is not to be endured, such as poetry, music, painting, public speaking. ↗

— Jean de la Bruyere

#certain things #endured #mediocrity #music #painting