A Quote by Edward Abbey

Poetry -- even bad poetry -- may be our final hope.

Edward Abbey

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Bad Even Final Hope May Our Poetry

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Edward Abbey
American - Author
January 29, 1927 - March 14, 1989

Poetry was syllable and rhythm. Poetry was the measurement of breath. Poetry was time make audible. Poetry evoked the present moment; poetry was the antidote to history. Poetry was language free from habit.

Damon Galgut

I began writing poetry when I was about 10. Bad poetry, but you start with bad poetry.

Jonas Mekas

I wrote poetry in middle school and high school and even through college. It was bad. I just don't think I'm very good at writing poetry. I mean, the distillation, I think, is hard for me, but I love poetry.

Jesmyn Ward

To different minds, poetry may present different phases. To me, the reverent faith of the people I lived among, and their faithful everyday living, was poetry; blossoms and trees and blue shies were poetry. God himself was poetry.

Lucy Larcom

Homosexuals are delicate and bad poetry is delicate and [Allen] Ginsberg turned the tables by making homosexual poetry strong poetry, almost manly poetry; but in the long run, the homo will remain the homo and not the poet.

Charles Bukowski

Civic poetry is public poetry. It is political poetry. It is about the hard stuff of life: money, crime, gender, corporate excess, racial injustice. It gives expression not just to our rites but also to our problems and even our values; these poems are not about rustic vacations.

Alissa Quart

It may very well be that we have entered another time when most poets will feel compelled to use poetry to stop things from happening. Yet I believe that even if poetry did not do this, it would be vital to our survival.

Matthew Zapruder

What poetry does above all else is develop sensibility. And that's what makes poetry so dangerous. That's why poetry is so good at undermining governments and so bad at building them. There's nothing harder to organize than a group of poets.

Sam Hamill

Well, probably I was fed up with concrete poetry. There was a lot of bad concrete poetry and besides, it was confused with visual poetry which was completely different.

Ian Hamilton Finlay

Poetry is the most informative of all of the arts because everything comes down to poetry. No matter what it is we are describing, ultimately we use either a metaphor; or we say "that's poetry in motion." You drink a glass of wine and say, "that's poetry in a bottle." Everything is poetry, so I think we come down to emotional information. And that's what poetry conveys.

Nikki Giovanni

I myself have never called what I write anti-poetry. I also think that my poetry should not be only known as the poetry of Ernesto Cardenal but rather as Nicaraguan poetry.

Ernesto Cardenal

That's one of those questions that would just love to have a pat answer. You know, poetry's job is to make us feel good. Poetry exists to allow us to express our innermost feelings. There isn't one role for poetry in society. There are many roles for poetry. I wrote a poem to seduce my wife. I wrote a poem when I asked her to marry me. Poetry got me laid. Poetry got me married.

Sam Hamill

If you go into a bar in most places in America and even say the word poetry, you'll probably get beaten up. But poetry is a really strong, beautiful form to me, and a lot of innovation in language comes from poetry.

Jim Jarmusch

I hope that the feeling of making poetry is not confined to the people who write it down. There is no luxury like it, and I hope we all share it. ... I am sure that the great glory of poetry in one's heart does not wait on achievement.

Stella Benson

A banker warned the British poet Robert Graves that one could not grow rich writing poetry. He replied that if there was no money in poetry, there was certainly no poetry in money, and so it was all even.

Robert Graves

To know anything of a poet but his poetry is, so far as the poetry is concerned, to know something that may be entertaining, even delightful, but is certainly inessential.

John Drinkwater

A Quote by Edward Abbey

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