Many poets in Iran have learned to speak almost a secret language, where political issues are talked about in allegorical ways.
The terms of poetry - some simple, some complicated, some ancient, some new - should bring us closer to what we're hearing, enlarging our experience of it, enabling us to describe what we're reading, to feel and think with greater precision.
Those who talk on the razor-edge of double-meanings pluck the rarest blooms from the precipice on either side.
You need that guy like a giraffe needs strep throat.
Truth speaks best in the language of poetry and symbolism, I think.
What is a quote? A quote (cognate with quota) is a cut, a section, a slice of someone's orange. You suck the slice, toss the rind, skate away.
And what is the very essence of poetry if it is not this 'metaphorical language'-this marking of the before unapprehended relations of things?
Poetry is a kind of distilled insinuation. It's a way of expanding and talking around an idea or a question. Sometimes, more actually gets said through such a technique than a full frontal assault.
Somehow it seems more clever to refer to something instead of saying it.
I don't write things that are wildly abstractly atonal.
You marvel at the economy and this choice of words. How many ways can you describe the sky and the moon? After Sylvia Plath, what can you say?
I'm the candidate who forgot to take off her hat before she threw it in the ring.
Gonna rain like a cow pissin' on a flat rock" [drugstore clerk to detective Virgil Flowers] Dark of the Moon, p.7
I always say that I went to the College of Blossoms and the University of Ray Charles.
The things that are said in literature are always the same. What is important is the way they are said. Looking for metaphors, for example: When I was a young man I was always hunting for new metaphors. Then I found out that really good metaphors are always the same.
Human language is mythological and metaphorical by nature.
She heard pa shouting,"Jiminy crickets!It's raining fish-hooks and hammer handles!
I've always thought my poems told stories.
I find Shakespeare terrifying. When Simon Russell Beale does a speech, I understand every word of it, but if I did the same speech, people would be going, 'Huh? What?'
Some so speak in exaggerations and superlatives that we need to make a large discount from their statements before we can come at their real meaning.
[But] we accept irony through a device called metaphor. And through that we grow and become deeper human beings.
I'll love you, dear, I'll love you till China and Africa meet and the river jumps over the mountain and the salmon sing in the street.
The leaf fall of his words, the stained glass hues of his moods, the rust in his voice, the smoke in his mouth, his breath on my vision like human breath blinding a mirror.
Poetry has the virtue of being able to say twice as much as prose in half the time, and the drawback, if you do not give it your full attention, of seeming to say half as much in twice the time.
There is poetry even in prose, in all the great prose which is not merely utilitarian or didactic: there exist poets who write in prose or at least in more or less apparent prose; millions of poets write verses which have no connection with poetry.
