Poetry

I could no more define poetry than a terrier can define a rat.

A great many people seem to think writing poetry is worthwhile, even though it pays next to nothing and is not as widely read as it should be.

You will not find poetry anywhere unless you bring some of it with you.

But I am not political in the current events sense, and I have never wanted anyone to read my poetry that way.

Poetry isn't just different from prose, it's more important for the human species.

On a summer night it can be lovely to sit around outside with friends after dinner and, yes, read poetry to each other. Keats and Yeats will never let you down, but it's differently exciting to read the work of poets who are still walking around out there.

In poetry you can express almost inexpressible feelings. You can express the pain of loss, you can express love. People always turn to poetry when someone they love dies, when they fall in love.

Lately, I've been thinking about the difference between poetry and prose, and as I've experienced it, poetry is insistent. It allows for images and statements to operate in a single space and resonate powerfully without the application to be elaborated upon and narrated.

We read Robert Browning's poetry. Here we needed no guidance from the professor: the poems themselves were enough.

What is the point of narrating poetry when the listener can't appreciate and enjoy the meaning?

There is the view that poetry should improve your life. I think people confuse it with the Salvation Army.

Poetry is something to make us wiser and better, by continually revealing those types of beauty and truth, which God has set in all men's souls.

And, I mean, I think poetry does need to be met to some extent, especially, I guess, 19th century poetry, and for me, it's just been so worth the effort. It's like I'm planting a garden in my head.

As a direct line to human feeling, empathic experience, genuine language and detail, poetry is everything that headline news is not. It takes us inside situations, helps us imagine life from more than one perspective, honors imagery and metaphor - those great tools of thought - and deepens our confidence in a meaningful world.

Without poetry, stories would be told in sepia.

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.

If there were no poetry on any day in the world, poetry would be invented that day. For there would be an intolerable hunger.

I always thought millennials are going westward, and they probably won't understand vernacular poetry.

Lena Dunham and Jenni Konner, who founded Lenny Books together, also happen to have exquisite reading tastes - from obscure small press poetry chapbook to dishy memoirs to literary novels - and so it's a real honor that they've chosen to announce their imprint with my stories.

Well, I still write poetry, but I wouldn't call myself a poet.