A Quote by Kenneth Koch

Poetry is a deliberate attempt to make language suggestive and imprecise.

Kenneth Koch

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Attempt Deliberate Language Make Poetry Poetry Is Suggestive

Quote Author

Kenneth Koch
American - Poet
February 27, 1925 - July 6, 2002

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

Poetry doesn't function by saying things straightforwardly because the language is too imprecise, too limited often, to address the underlying subject of most poems.

Pattiann Rogers

Since the boundary of the world of poetry is fluid, the language in it is also fluid. Hence, the language that is outside of the poetry world, namely the language that is not the language of poetry, cannot go into the poetry world.

Kim Hyesoon

We believe we can also show that words do not have exactly the same psychic "weight" depending on whether they belong to the language of reverie or to the language of daylight life-to rested language or language under surveillance-to the language of natural poetry or to the language hammered out by authoritarian prosodies.

Gaston Bachelard

Chemistry has the same quickening and suggestive influence upon the algebraist as a visit to the Royal Academy, or the old masters may be supposed to have on a Browning or a Tennyson. Indeed it seems to me that an exact homology exists between painting and poetry on the one hand and modem chemistry and modem algebra on the other. In poetry and algebra we have the pure idea elaborated and expressed through the vehicle of language, in painting and chemistry the idea enveloped in matter, depending in part on manual processes and the resources of art for its due manifestation.

James Joseph Sylvester

The language of poetry is not stuck in place. Nothing can own language. I think, however, the genre of poetry itself is very feminine and motherly.

Kim Hyesoon

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.

Jaume Cabre

I wanted to become a writer and felt that poetry was perfected language, so having it in my subconscious mind would make the music of language always available to me.

Caterina Fake

Poetry cannot be translated; and, therefore, it is the poets that preserve the languages; for we would not be at the trouble to learn a language if we could have all that is written in it just as well in a translation. But as the beauties of poetry cannot be preserved in any language except that in which it was originally written, we learn the language.

Samuel Johnson

The language of politics is poetry, not prose. Jackson is poetry. Cuomo is poetry. Dukakis is a word processor.

Richard M. Nixon

Pound described poetry as original research in language, and just as formal experiment in poetry has to try things and has to go too far, so does experiment with writing about politics in poetry and what the politics of poetry is.

Robert Hass

[Photography is] very related to poetry. It's suggestive and fragmentary and unsatisfying in a lot of ways. It's as much about what you leave out as what you put in.

Alec Soth

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 love poetry. It's at the heart of everything I do. Poetry transforms what we call language, and uses language as the stuff to become something else. I get spun around by what happens in words. When that occurs, it inspires images that seem so original to me as an artist, even though I'm following what the poem has offered.

Ashley Bryan

Poetry is interesting because not everyone is going to become a great poet, but anyone can be, and anyone can enjoy poetry, and it's this openness, this accessibility of poetry that makes it the language of people.