Audre Lorde Quotes

A poem is true if it hangs together. Information points to something else. A poem points to nothing but itself.

Well, I like to write poetry. I'm a published poet.

A poem records emotions and moods that lie beyond normal language, that can only be patched together and hinted at metaphorically.

The writer is someone who tears himself to pieces in order to liberate his neighbor.

I think people turn to poetry more often than they think they do, or encounter it in more ways than they think that they do. I think we forget the places that we encounter it, say, in songs or in other little bits and pieces of things that we may have remembered from childhood.

I do think that all of us think in poems.

I sometimes talk about the making of a poem within the poem.

Poetry is thoughts that breathe, and words that burn.

I would admit that poetry is something more than mere communication and that if that 'something more' could be abstracted from the whole, it might well prove to be that which makes the whole a poem.

Religious poetry, civic poetry, lyric or dramatic poetry are all categories of man's expression which are valid only if the endorsement of formal content is valid.

In fact, in lyric poetry, truthfulness becomes recognizable as a ring of truth within the medium itself.

I find a lot of poetry very disappointing, but I do have poets that I go back to. One book of poetry that I'd like to mention is 'The Exchange' by Sophie Cabot Black. Her poems are difficult without being too difficult.

There are no poetic ideas; only poetic utterances.

The poet never asks for admiration; he wants to be believed.

What a great poem teaches you - and it's not intellectual at all - is the resonance in the language that's heard there. This goes back to the very origins of poetry and to the very origins of language.

Look at Allen Ginsberg. In poems like 'Kaddish' and 'Howl,' you can hear a cantor between the lines. It's fully alive, and I think that's what's missing in modern poetry. It's too dry and cerebral.

I believe that poetry should communicate.

In bohemian circles, we were very aware that poetry was missing from popular culture.

I've always felt that poetry was particularly erotic, more than prose was... I say that you read poems not with your eyes and not with your ears, but with your mouth. You taste it.

When it comes to poetry, I think partly the numbers of people attempting to write poems is probably a result or the reaction to technology.

Poetry and imagination begin life. A child will fall on its knees on the gravel walk at the sight of a pink hawthorn in full flower, when it is by itself, to praise God for it.

Truth speaks best in the language of poetry and symbolism, I think.

I really came to literature through poetry.

For me, the poetry in a work is that which makes visible the invisible.

A way of using words to say things which could not possibly be said in any other way, things which in a sense do not exist till they are born … in poetry.