Michael Snider
Poetry exists because it is in our nature to make play of our surplus.
Gregory Vincent St. Thomasino
Food, drink, conversation, sex, anything that can be realized and completely enjoyed in the act: none of this is for poetry. Poetry is for whatever cannot be had; this is its particular charm.
Juan Ramón Jiménez, The Complete Perfectionist; translated by Christopher Maurer
Poetry is one of the destinies of speech...One would say that the poetic image, in its newness, opens a future to language.
Gaston Bachelard
Our life is, in so far as it is worth living, made up in great part of things indefinite, impalpable; and it is precisely because the arts present us these things that we—humanity—cannot get on without the arts. The picture that suggests indefinite poems, the line of verse that means a gallery of paintings, the modulation that suggests a score of metaphors and is contained in none: it is these things that touch us nearly that matter.
Ezra Pound
In my book, poetry is a necessity of life. It is a function of poetry to locate those zones inside us that would be free, and declare them so.
C.D. Wright
...poetry is not a luxury. It is a vital necessity of our existence. It forms the quality of the light within which we predicate our hopes and dreams toward survival and change... Poetry is the way we help give name to the nameless so it can be thought. The farthest horizons of our hopes and fears are cobbled by our poems, carved from the rock experiences of our daily lives.
Audre Lorde
A good poem is a contribution to reality. The world is never the same once a good poem has been added to it. A good poem helps to change the shape of the universe, helps to extend everyone's knowledge of himself and the world around him.
Dylan Thomas
The language of the poem shatters the cogito, which was always never unified: the language of the poem pulls the mask of self-unity off the cogito . . .
Erin Moure
The purpose of poetry is to remind us / how difficult it is to remain just one person.
Czeslaw Milosz
I come to consider language by how it uses me. Poetry offers a transformative summons. It enacts my own felt need to engage emotional, aesthetic, and intellectual experience in forms neither self-serving nor predatory. [ . . . ] The great capacity of language is to bring us into proximity with one another. We fill with recognitions. In my own encounter with poetry, I approach the imagined possibility of an attentive mode of being. Shifting my perspective, poetry reconstructs my relationship with the world and to the future. I am torn awake.
Forrest Gander
Art is the means we have of undoing the damage of haste. It's what
everything else isn't. Theodore Roethke
To defend poetry means to defend a fundamental gift of human nature, that is, our capacity...to experience astonishment and to stop still in that astonishment for an extended moment or two.
Adam Zagajewski
In my civilization it's customary to describe poetry as discarded, almost moribund, an all-too-exclusive art form, without power to break through. And the poets try to push themselves upon the world of the mass media, to get a few crumbs of attention. I think it is time to emphasize that poetry--in spite of all the bad poets and bad readers--starts from an advantageous position. A piece of paper, some words: it's simple and practical. It gives independence. Poetry requires no heavy, vulnerable apparatus that has to be lugged around, it isn't dependent on temperamental performers, dictatorial directors, bright producers with irresistible ideas. No big money is at stake. A poem doesn't come in one copy that somebody buys and locks up in a storeroom waiting for its market value to go up; it can't be stolen from a museum or become currency in the buying and selling of narcotics, or get burned up by a vandal.
When I started writing, at 16, I had a couple of like-minded school friends. Sometimes, when the lessons seemed more than usually trying, we would pass notes to each other between our desks--poems and aphorisms, which would come back with the more or less enthusiastic comments of the recipient. What an impression those scribblings would make! There is the fundamental situation of poetry. The lesson of official life goes rumbling on. We send inspired notes to one another.
Tomas Tranströmer. Translated by Judith Moffett. from "Answer to Uj Iras." Ironwood 13 (1979): 38-9.
I believe that the justification of art is the internal
combustion it ignites...and not its shallow,
externalized, public manifestations. The purpose of art is not the
release of a momentary ejection of adrenaline but is, rather, the
gradual, lifelong construction of a state of wonder and serenity.
Glen Gould
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