I see a resurgence of interest in poetry. I am less optimistic about the prospects for the arts when it comes to federal funding.
Poetry is, first and last, language - the rest is filler.
Pain is filtered in a poem so that it becomes finally, in the end, pleasure.
I wrote some of the worst poetry west from the Mississippi River, but I wrote. And I finally sometimes got it right.
When I was in college, I used to write little ditties and short stories and poetry for my friends. Writing a book is another thing. It is so much different from my traditional day of dirty fingernails and greasy hair and hot pans.
Most of the time, as an artist, I can be self-indulgent, fulfilling my own impulses, embracing imagery that contains poetry on my own terms, without immediate regard to an audience or the particular placement of my finished work.
The subject of Finnish poetry ought to have a special interest for the Japanese student, if only for the reason that Finnish poetry comes more closely in many respects to Japanese poetry than any other form of Western poetry.
I started reading seriously after I was in college. I read comic books. I read every 'Power Man' and 'Iron Fist' that ever came out. I had a teacher introduce me to poetry, and that kind of woke me up.
In the long revolt against inherited forms that has by now become the narrative of 20th-century poetry in English, no poet was more flamboyant or more recognizable in his iconoclasm than Cummings.
When I am writing fiction, I believe I am much better organized, more methodical - one has to be when writing a novel. Writing poetry is a state of free float.
At school, I was never given a sense that poetry was something flowery or light. It's a complex and controlled way of using language. Rhythms and the music of it are very important. But the difficulty is that poetry makes some kind of claim of honesty.
I was proud my father spoke Arabic fluently - his father sent him to learn Arabic from a sheikh - and we had Arab friends. His task of understanding the Arabs - not only politics but poetry - was very important; he took it as a vocation.
Maybe it is something to do with age, but I have become fonder of poetry than of prose.
When you act, you've got to be like a poet or a musician. It's not about evidence before court. It's not a forensic subject. It's poetry; it's a completely different place.
If poetry and the arts do anything, they can fortify your inner life, your inwardness.
The line is a way of framing poetry. All verse is measured by lines. The poetic line immediately announces its difference from everyday speech and prose.
France is not poetic; she even feels, in fact, a congenital horror of poetry. Among the writers who use verse, those whom she will always prefer are the most prosaic.
A poet's work is to name the unnameable, to point at frauds, to take sides, start arguments, shape the world, and stop it going to sleep.
Modernism in other arts brought extreme difficulty. In poetry, the characteristic difficulty imported under the name of modernism was obscurity. But obscurity could just as easily be a quality of metrical as of free verse.
The voice is raised, and that is where poetry begins. And even today, in the prolonged aftermath of modernism, in places where 'open form' or free verse is the orthodoxy, you will find a memory of that raising of the voice in the term 'heightened speech.'
