Yehuda Amichai

I've often said that all poetry is political. This is because real poems deal with a human response to reality and politics is part of reality, history in the making. Even if a poet writes about sitting in a glass house drinking tea, it reflects politics.

Israeli Poet

Jiddu Krishnamurti

You must understand the whole of life, not just one little part of it. That is why you must read, that is why you must look at the skies, that is why you must sing and dance, and write poems and suffer and understand, for all that is life.

Indian Philosopher

Erica Jong

Often I find that poems predict what I'm going to do later in my own writing, and often I find that poems predict my life. So I think poetry is the most intense expression of feeling that we have.

American Novelist

Franz Wright

For about twenty years, if I managed to write ten or twelve poems in a year; I considered that a pretty successful year, but I wrote 'The Beforelife' within a year.

American Poet

Jill Scott

One day, I just got up to read a poem and started singing. I looked around - the reaction was great. And I said, 'Oh, boy. I like this.

American Musician

Howard Nemerov

I've never read a political poem that's accomplished anything. Poetry makes things happen, but rarely what the poet wants.

Mark Strand

Usually a life turned into a poem is misrepresented.

Robert Penn Warren

How do poems grow? They grow out of your life.

Robert Frost

A poem begins in delight and ends in wisdom.

Paul Engle

The way to praise a poet is to write a poem.

Poems often convey emotions; feeling the words helps in understanding.

Emotional Expression

Remember, a poem is not just any writing; it has a special rhythm or pattern.

Not Prose

Some poems use cultural references; you may need extra info to fully grasp them.

Cultural Interpretation

When 'poem' describes non-written art, it means it's beautifully expressive.

Metaphorical Use

Look for 'poem' in diverse contexts; it's not confined to writing.

Beyond Literature

'Poem' in art means it should evoke strong images or feelings in you.

Evocative Vision

 where each school can be flourishing tomorrow. That's where children experience life. Or at home, if that's what they choose, to be educated with their families or friends. There's been a lot of talk about dreams over the course of these few days. And I wanted to just very quickly -- I was very struck by Natalie Merchant's songs last night, recovering old poems.

Bring on the learning...

 These included descriptions of scenery and lists of characters, and helped the rhapsode keep their place in the narrative, just as the chorus or bridge of a song helps us to remember the next verses. Because most of the tales were familiar to the audience, it was common to hear the sections of the poem out of order.

Everything you need to...

 and the phonograph. Within that divide, through the creation of his most important contribution to poetry, the calligram, Guillaume Apollinaire built a bridge. Apollinaire created the calligram as a poem picture, a written portrait, a thoughts drawing, and he used it to express his modernism

The poet who painted...

 "It is not a novel. Still less an epic poem. Still less a historical chronicle. 'War and Peace' is what the author wanted and was able to express in the form in which it was expressed." It is, in other words, the sum total of Tolstoy's imaginative powers, and nothing less.

Why should you read...

 a small portrait of what it's like to live in this world of change and time, our human fate is to vanish, as surely as that small cricket will, and still, we do what it does. We live, we sing. Sometimes a poem takes a metaphor and extends it,

The art of the metaphor...

 Poets themselves have struggled with this question, often using metaphors to approximate a definition. Is a poem a little machine? A firework? An echo? A dream? Poetry generally has certain recognizable characteristics.

What makes a poem … a...

 wrote a series of poems in praise of Howard's clouds, which ended with the memorable lines, "As clouds ascend, are folded, scatter, fall, Let the world think of thee who taught it all,"

How did clouds get their...

 winter I unearthed the box of old family books and found the poem again the important places flipping through dad's old slides it occurred to me that maybe

Rediscovering Youth on...

 right underneath for the love of words it said poetry is like pooping if there's a poem inside you it has to come

Poetry makes people...

 them on towards the poem but things don't always go to plan