National Poetry Month: My Favorite Quotes on Poetry
In honor of National Poetry Month, I created this collection of some of my favorite quotes on the power and art of poetry, by great women poets. I hope it inspires you to write or read more poetry!
“Poetry is the most intimate of all writing. I want to speak first from me to myself and then from me to you.” –Ellen Bass
“Poetry is language at its most distilled and most powerful.” –Rita Dove
“We can train ourselves to respect our feelings and to transpose them into a language so they can be shared. And where that language does not yet exist, it is our poetry which helps to fashion it.” –Audre Lorde
“I think most artists create art in order to explore, not give the answers. Poetry and art are not about answers to me; they are about questions.” –Lucille Clifton
“Every poem holds the unspeakable inside it. The unsayable…The thing you can’t really say because it’s too complicated. It’s too complex for us. Every poem has that silence deep in the center of it.” –Marie Howe
“You have to have sharp ears And you have to not be afraid of being human.” –Maya Angelou, on being a poet
“I want to be clear about this. If you wrote from experience, you’d probably get one book, maybe three poems. Writers write from empathy.” –Nikki Giovanni
“Poetry is a political act because it involves telling the truth.” –June Jordan
“We live in the word. And the word is precious, and the word must be precise, and the word is one of the ways we have to reach across to each other, and…it has to be tended with that degree of respect…I believe that life itself is profoundly poetic, in all sorts of…guises and unexpected places.” –Elizabeth Alexander
