#poetry

How can I tell Bob that my happiness streams from having wrenched a piece out of my life, a piece of hurt and beauty, and transformed it to typewritten words on paper? How can he know I am justifying my life, my keen emotions, my feeling, by turning it into print? ↗

— Sylvia Plath

#poetry #writing #beauty

That's the way it is with poetry: When it is incomprehensible it seems profound, and when you understand it, it is only ridiculous. ↗

— Galway Kinnell

#only #poetry #profound #ridiculous #seems

The trouble with us in America isn't that the poetry of life has turned to prose, but that it has turned to advertising copy. ↗

— Louis Kronenberger

#america #copy #life #poetry #prose

Why are you so hard on yourself? I love you just the way you are, with your withered coat and wet scarf dangling like a spotless chandelier. The snow banks in Montreal are high, but I can see your trace, and silent grace and tin cup through the paned window. The precipitation melts your face, distorting your expression through the aged glass; broken, when I threw ancient stones to get your attention as a child. I wanted a friend. The honest kind. ↗

— V.S. Atbay - Epiphany A Collection of Poems

#poetry-quotes #age

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 is not communication with angels or with the "subconscious." It is communication with the guts, genitals, and five portals of sense. Nothing more. ↗

— Thomas Pynchon

#communication

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

Ideas must work through the brains and arms of men, or they are no better than dreams ↗

— Ralph Waldo Emerson

#dreams

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