Read. Read. Read. Read. Read great books. Read poetry, history, biography. Read the novels that have stood the test of time. And read closely.
One of the sad realities today is that very few people, especially young people, read books. Unless we can find imaginative ways of addressing this reality, future generations are in danger of losing their history.
Yes, I read. I have that absurd habit. I like beautiful poems, moving poetry, and all the beyond of that poetry. I am extraordinarily sensitive to those poor, marvelous words left in our dark night by a few men I never knew.
Read. Read every chance you get. Read to keep growing. Read history. Read poetry. Read for pure enjoyment. Read a book called Life on a Little Known Planet. It's about insects. It will make you feel better.
For a lot of people, poetry tends to be dull. It's not read much. It takes a special kind of training and a lot of practice to read poetry with pleasure. It's like learning to like asparagus.
Sometimes he would advise me to read poetry, and would send me in his letters quantities of verses and whole poems, which he wrote from memory. 'Read poetry,' he wrote: 'poetry makes men better.' How often, in my later life, I realized the truth of this remark of his! Read poetry: it makes men better.
I read a lot of poetry. All types of poetry, but mostly Catalan poetry, because I believe poetry is the essence of language. Reading the classics, be they medieval or contemporary, gives me a stylistic energy that I'm very interested in.
Poetry can save the world. I'm a real believer in its power of healing and transforming. I wish more people read it ... Poetry is probably as close as I would get to religious feeling. I think poetry makes the world stand still.
Because, in fact, women, feminists, do read my poetry, and they read it often with the power of their political interpretation. I don't care; that's what poetry is supposed to do.
In the past few years I've assigned books to be read before a student attends one of my weeklong seminars. I have been astonished by how few people -- people who supposedly want to write -- read books, and if they read them, how little they examine them.
Yes, I am sad, sad as a circus-lioness, sad as an eagle without wings, sad as a violin with only one string and that one broken, sad as a woman who is growing old. Sad, sad, sad.
When people decide to talk publicly about poetry as an art form and how it's received, they often get very abject about it: "Nobody reads poetry," and then a thousand people write back, "No, we read poetry." There's an abundance of this negative preaching to the choir, and it's very similar to the experience I'm having.
There's a phrase that art is something created by the few and admired by the many. Now it's not created by the few, it's created by anyone. They just plug in a drum machine and read some dirty high school poetry.
There are only three things in the world, one is to read poetry, another is to write poetry, and the best of all is to live poetry.
I read poetry every day. I love the boiled down essence of poetry. I look for poetry in prose. In a way that evocative.
My feeling is that most political poetry is preaching to the choir, and that the people who are going to make the political changes in our lives are not the people who read poetry, unfortunately. Poetry not specifically aimed at political revolution, though, is beneficial in moving people toward that kind of action, as well as other kinds of action. A good poem makes me want to be active on as many fronts as possible.