Active Quote by Kim Hyesoon

Poetry is an intimate act. It's about bringing forth something that's inside you--whether it is a memory, a philosophical idea, a deep love for…

— Dorianne Laux

By definition, poetry works with qualities and dynamics that mainstream society is reluctant to face head-on. It's an interesting phenomenon that by necessity, poetry…

— David Whyte

Poetry is an act of distillation. It takes contingency samples, is selective. It telescopes time. It focuses what most often floods past us in…

— Diane Ackerman

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…

— Yusef Komunyakaa

Poetry is simply literature reduced to the essence of its active principle. It is purged of idols of every kind, of realistic illusions, of…

— Paul Valery

Poetry is a release of something previously unknown into the visible. You write to invite that, to make of yourself a gathering of the…

— Jane Hirshfield

Poetry is either something that lives like fire inside you -- like music to the musician or Marxism to the Communist -- or else…

— F. Scott Fitzgerald

Poetry is an awareness of the world, a particular way of relating to reality.

— Andrei Tarkovsky

Poetry is a kind of magic that very few can create and even fewer can truly understand and appreciate in all its glory.

— Dennis Gabor

Poetry is a beautiful way of expressing feelings - happy, sad, angry, caring. It's also a way that we share with other people, to…

— Mattie Stepanek

Poetry is a very complex art.... It is an art of pure sound bound in through an art of arbitrary and conventional symbols.

— Ezra Pound

Poetry is ordinary language raised to the Nth power. Poetry is boned with ideas, nerved and blooded with emotions, all held together by the…

— Paul Engle