Writing poetry makes you intensely conscious of how words sound, both aloud and inside the head of the reader. You learn the weight of words and how they sound to the ear. Helen Dunmore
I've always written. When I was in school, the only teacher who ever liked me was my creative writing teacher. I used to enter poetry competitions, and I don't think I ever lost one. So I had the idea for a while of being some kind of poet. Justin Townes Earle
I heard Nirvana, and discovered that songs could be like poetry, but a little bit more refined: you didn't have to have 20 verses to get your point across. Justin Townes Earle
I began the way nearly everybody I ever heard of - I began writing poetry. And I find that to be quite usual with writers, their trying their hand at poetry. Shelby Foote
I used to write sonnets and various things, and moved from there into writing prose, which, incidentally, is a lot more interesting than poetry, including the rhythms of prose. Shelby Foote
Most people can't tell now who wrote what. I like that blurring of identities within the band. because it becomes a unified thing that can't be related to other forms of historical poetry. Thurston Moore
So I suppose poetry, language, the shaping of it, was and remains for me an effort to make sense out of essentially senseless situations. Thomas Lynch
Writing poetry is the hard manual labor of the imagination. Ishmael Reed
I see no reason for calling my work poetry except that there is no other category in which to put it. Marianne Moore
Poetry, especially traditional Iranian poetry, is very good at looking at things from a number of different angles simultaneously. Asghar Farhadi
As for political poetry, as it's usually defined, it seems there's very little good political poetry. Kenneth Koch
I love painting and music, of course. I don't know nearly as much about them as I know about poetry. I've certainly been influenced by fiction. I was overwhelmed by War and Peace when I read it, and I didn't read it until I was in my late 20s. Kenneth Koch
I was excited by what my painter friends were doing, and they seemed to be interested in our poetry too, and that was a wonderful little, fizzy sort of world. Kenneth Koch
I wonder if I ever thought of an ideal reader... I guess when I was in my 20s and in New York and maybe even in my early 30s, I would write for my wife Janice... mainly for my poet friends and my wife, who was very smart about poetry. Kenneth Koch
I was influenced by surrealist poetry and painting as were thousands of other people, and it seems to me to have become a part of the way I write, but it's not. Kenneth Koch
You watch an old 'Jeopardy!' and the categories alone are very plain. 'Poetry,' or 'Movies,' or 'Physics.' If you watch it now, though, there'll be a theme board where the categories are all Hitchcock movies. Lots more jokes, lots more high-concept categories and questions. Ken Jennings
I believe that the short story is as different a form from the novel as poetry is, and the best stories seem to me to be perhaps closer in spirit to poetry than to novels. Tobias Wolff
Poetry teaches us music, metaphor, condensation and specificity. Walter Mosley
But it is the province of religion, of philosophy, of pure poetry only, to go beyond life, beyond time, into eternity. Alfred de Vigny