#poetry

breathe in experience breathe out poetry ↗

— Muriel Rukeyser

#poetry #experience

What does that represent? There was never any question in plastic art, in poetry, in music, of representing anything. It is a matter of making something beautiful, moving, or dramatic - this is by no means the same thing. ↗

— Fernand Leger

#anything #art #beautiful #does #dramatic

Poetry leads us to the unstructured sources of our beings, to the unknown, and returns us to our rational, structured selves refreshed. Having once experienced the mystery, plenitude, contradiction, and composure of a work of art, we afterward have a built-in resistance to the slogans and propaganda of oversimplification that have often contributed to the destruction of human life. Poetry is a verbal means to a nonverbal source. It is a motion to no-motion, to the still point of contemplation and deep realization. ↗

— A.R. Ammons

#art

If I do a poetry reading I want people to walk out and say they feel better for having been there - not because you've done a comedy performance but because you're talking about your father dying or having young children, things that touch your soul. ↗

— Roger McGough

#because #been #better #children #comedy

Let me tell you something about meditation. At the absolute center, is the vortex we are spun from like clay, there is a shaping hand which is neither Godlike nor peaceful as you imagine. ↗

— Forrest Gander

#imagination

Hope and Memory have one daughter and her name is Art, and she has built her dwelling far from the desperate field where men hang out their garments upon forked boughs to be banners of battle. O beloved daughter of Hope and Memory, be with me for a while. ↗

— W.B. Yeats

#hope #literature #memory #poetry #art

The gross heathenism of civilization has generally destroyed nature, and poetry, and all that is spiritual. ↗

— John Muir

#destroyed #generally #gross #nature #poetry

I think it was T.S. Eliot who talked about good poetry being felt before it's understood. I believe that. There are some bands where I love their lyrics but I don't have a clue what they're on about. ↗

— Marcus Mumford

#bands #before #being #believe #clue

Reading the very best writers—let us say Homer, Dante, Shakespeare, Tolstoy—is not going to make us better citizens. Art is perfectly useless, according to the sublime Oscar Wilde, who was right about everything. He also told us that all bad poetry is sincere. Had I the power to do so, I would command that these words be engraved above every gate at every university, so that each student might ponder the splendor of the insight. ↗

— Harold Bloom

#oscar-wilde #poetry #reading #age

So now I have a collection of poetry by Aaron Neville and I give it to people I want to share it with. I'd like to publish it someday. ↗

— Aaron Neville

#collection #give #i #like #now