Top 100 Quotes About Poetry Reading
#1. Poetry reading is the chamber music of the actor's craft.
Robert Lacey
#2. If I do a poetry reading I want people to walk out and say they feel better for having been there - not because you've done a comedy performance but because you're talking about your father dying or having young children, things that touch your soul.
Roger McGough
#3. I think that is where poetry reading becomes such an individual thing. I mean I have friend who like poets who just don't say anything to me at all, I mean they seem to me rather ordinary and pedestrian.
James Laughlin
#4. I'm a professional and I'll do anything - a poetry reading, television, cinema, anything that allows me to act.
Peter O'Toole
#5. Attending a poetry reading is like being in a hospital," he said as we left the next station. "Full of neuroses.
Karl Ove Knausgard
#6. It was a scary thought. A man could be surrounded by poetry reading and not know it.
Richard Russo
#7. Reading a stranger's words and finding yourself in them.
Jenim Dibie
#8. Ah, distinctly I remember it was in the bleak December
And each separate dying ember wrought its ghost upon the floor.
Eagerly I wished the morrow; - vainly I had sought to borrow
From my books surcease of sorrow - sorrow for the lost Lenore.
Edgar Allan Poe
#9. 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.
David McCullough
#10. A man awakes every morning
and instead of reading the newspaper
reads Act V of Othello.
He sips his coffee and is content
that this is the news he needs
as his wife looks on helplessly.
B.J. Ward
#11. At home the bookshelves connected heaven and earth.
Lisel Mueller
#12. I never thought I'd be doing poetry books. I never really studied poetry. But the first one I did was after my mother died, and I realized that people sort of think and talk about her style and fashion, but in fact, what made her the person she was was really her love of reading and ideas.
Caroline Kennedy
#13. When I first started reading poetry, all the poets I read - Edgar Allan Poe, Oliver Wendell Holmes, John Greenleaf Whittier - were rhyme poets. That's what captured me.
Marv Levy
#14. I entered a poem in a poetry contest around 1987, and the poem won and I received $1,000 for it. That made me realize that maybe what I was writing was worth reading to people. After that, for some reason, I turned to novels and I've written mainly novels ever since.
Sharon Creech
#15. It is absurd and anti-life to be a part of a system that compels you to listen to a stranger reading poetry when you want to learn to construct buildings, or to sit with a stranger discussing the construction of buildings when you want to read poetry.
John Taylor Gatto
#17. Poetry is everywhere; it just needs editing.
James Tate
#18. There is a line of poetry, a sentence in a fable, a word in an essay, by which my existence is justified; find that line, and immortality is assured.
Alberto Manguel
#19. From reading a previous answer, you know that I consider all those aspects to be part of American cultural myth and thus they figure into good American poetry, whether the poet is aware of what he is doing or not.
Diane Wakoski
#20. The masters of information have forgotten about poetry, where words may have a meaning quite different from what the lexicon says, where the metaphoric spark is always one jump ahead of the decoding function, where another, unforeseen reading is always possible.
J.M. Coetzee
#21. For whatever reason, people, including very well-educated people or people otherwise interested in reading, do not read poetry.
Paul Muldoon
#22. After I consumed Frost in his entirety, my days of exploration began. I read The Diving Comedy while leafing through E. E. Cummings. I read Sidney and Milton and Shelley, piecing together my own aesthetics, my own defence of poetry. I felt alone and religious and desperately sad.
Spencer Gordon
#23. The success of the poem is determined not by how much the poet felt in writing it, but by how much the reader feels in reading it.
John Ciardi
#24. The pen, a double-edged mystery: cuts the writer, heals the reader.
Jenim Dibie
#25. I've been reading poetry publicly for 20 years, and this is what you do - you express, you sometimes dig a bit to get a conversation started. That's the point of poetry. You're supposed to go, 'Hmmmm,' and 'Woooh!'
Jill Scott
#26. I want to read every book that's written
hear every song that was sung
I want to gaze at every cloud
and hold the zing of each fruit on my tongue.
Sanober Khan
#28. Poetry, plays, novels, music, they are the cry of the human spirit trying to understand itself and make sense of our world.
L.M. Elliott
#29. There's plenty of room for strangeness, mystery, originality, wildness, etc. in poems that also invite the reader into the human and alive center about which the poem circles.
Thomas Lux
#30. Maybe you're one of those people who writes poems, but rarely reads them. Let me put this as delicately as I can: If you don't read, your writing is going to suck.
Kim Addonizio
#31. Reading great works of literature, discovering poetry, and listening to the best composers are all ways that we learn to love the Creator more.
Jennifer A. Marshall
#32. I have made a similar suggestion for poetry: that one should approach it as pure sonority, reading and rereading it as a sort of music, and should not introduce meanings or intentions into the diction before clearly grasping the system of sounds that every poem must offer on pain of nonexistence.
Paul Valery
#33. You can learn more by going to the opera than you ever can by reading Emerson. Like that there are two sexes.
David Markson
#34. The idea that a poem was a made thing stayed with me, and I decided then that I wanted to be an artist, not just a diarist. So I put myself through a kind of apprenticeship in writing poetry, and I understood even then that my practice as a poet was deeply related to my reading.
Edward Hirsch
#35. And there are a lot more people reading poetry, but there are not so many people reading an individual poet.
Peter Davison
#37. It's not a love of poetry readings that attracts those who do come to them but theater.
A.R. Ammons
#38. Read a poem at a time, or two, or all, but give them time to sink into your heart. Read them again, read a portion, and stop and ponder. Visualize. Take it slow; let the poem show you what lies in your own heart. Let it fuel the words from within.
Salil Jha
#39. You fantasize about me reading my poems to you - it doesn't work that way - I write down everything later - living is not an after-thought ...
John Geddes
#40. People cannot stand the saddest truth I know about the very nature of reading and writing imaginative literature, which is that poetry does not teach us how to talk to other people: it teaches us how to talk to ourselves.
Harold Bloom
#41. We learn what poetry is - if we ever learn - by reading it.
T. S. Eliot
#42. Ah, hello." He gathered his courage. This was just like reading poetry, but subtract poems and add people casually placing hunting knives and daggers on their tables. One of the women was filing her fingernails into sharp points, like claws. Just like reading poetry.
Cynthia Hand
#43. Reading, at the deepest level, is a physical experience. Most people are not attuned to this, most people don't learn how to read - poetry for example, or high-quality prose. They're used to reading magazines and newspapers, which are only of the mind, but not of the body.
Paul Auster
#44. Who are you, a hundred years from today, reading my poetry with curiosity?
Rabindranath Tagore
#45. Sexual activity is driven by the same aims and motives as reading poetry or listening to music: to escape the limitations imposed by the need for particularity in the consciousness.
Colin Wilson
#47. The counsellor who never reads a novel or never opens a book of poetry is neglecting an important resource for empathic development.
Dave Mearns
#48. I read for pleasure
In search of fictional worlds
To enrich my truths
A.A. Patawaran
#49. Reading blogs would be like sentencing yourself to stand in a virtual online corner, trapped by some crashing bore who only wanted to talk about trains, or his poetry, or something.
Cecilia Peartree
#51. Well-wrought poems and works of imaginative literature can do for us what stone-cold prose can never do. They can help us grasp the full dimension of ways of life other than our own.
James W. Sire
#52. The act of love and the act of poetry
Are not compatible
With the reading aloud of a newspaper
Andre Breton
#53. To feel most beautifully alive means to be reading something beautiful, ready always to apprehend in the flow of language the sudden flash of poetry.
Gaston Bachelard
#54. Poets, on the face of it, have either got to be easier or to write their own notes; readers have either got to take more trouble over reading or cease to regard notes as pretentious and a sign of bad poetry
William Empson
#55. Reading haiku is as much an art as writing it. The reader needs to pause and listen to the silences, to feel the spaces between the words, and to journey into the depths of many multi-colored worlds.
Harley King
#56. Being Jewish, you didn't get into a sorority. So I really was much more outgoing and gregarious. I really didn't want to spend an Emily Dickinson adolescence reading poetry on gravestones, which I did.
Betty Friedan
#57. Watch, how the sun
slowly rises
from behind my ear
new lines, new countries
spring up in my palms
my rough hair
become swaying silk
and all the leaves
in my body
become lusher than fruits.
Sanober Khan
#58. As I read you I fell in love with the holes between your words and I loved you most on the days you could not love yourself.
Jenim Dibie
#59. I know they're not actually talking but the books on my desk seem to whisper "Drop what you're doing! Set aside your poetry! Open us, read us! Read slowly while you're at it. Always read us - every day - before you play.
Ed Sanders
#60. Probably induced by the asthma, I started reading and writing early on, my literary efforts from the age of about nine running chiefly to poetry and plays.
Patrick White
#61. Haiku does not express emotion from the inside out by displaying the mind of a character. Haiku builds the emotional thrust, makes the artistic statement from the outside in, from the physical world to the mind of the reader.
Harley King
#62. The ultimate aim of reading or writing poetry is to enrich one's life experience.
Marty Rubin
#63. I think my brain is full of collisions and that's how I like to read and process information. I'm always comparing things and I think I do that subconsciously when I'm reading books of poetry.
Victoria Chang
#64. How are poets able to unzip what they see around them, calling forth a truer essence from behind a common fact? Why, reading a verse about a pear, do you see past the fruit in so transcendent a way?
Elizabeth Berg
#65. He does not always remain bent over the
pages; he often leans back and closes
his eyes over a line he has been reading
again, and its meaning spreads through
his blood.
Rainer Maria Rilke
#66. I was completely devoted to reading and books from the age of seven. It took until I was 18 to have the confidence to write poetry.
Christopher Koch
#67. The work of great poetry is to aid us to become free artists ourselves ... The art of reading poetry is an authentic training in the augmentation of consciousness, perhaps the most authentic of healthy modes.
Harold Bloom
#68. A trip to the market in the morning to buy bread, an afternoon spent reading in a cafe - nothing was routine; a strange place helped you find the poetry in everyday life.
Brian Morton
#69. True fragrance speaks for itself. It does not require to be pointed out by the bearer.
Riaz Ahmed Gohar Shahi
#70. I do not have more information after reading a poem; I have more experience.
Eugene H. Peterson
#71. He didn't much like reading novels - he preferred history or philosophy - or poetry, although he could read only a little poetry at a time, because when a poem "spoke to him" it was as if a brilliant, agonizing light had been turned upon some tiny, private cell of his soul.
Claire Messud
#72. No one wants to read poetry. You have to make it impossible for them to put the poem down
impossible for them to stop reading it, word after word. You have to keep them from closing the book.
Muriel Rukeyser
#73. I am the girl who spends hours huddled in a corner of a library, trying to find what you love the most about Marlowe, just so I can write you a poem worthy of Shakespeare. I've made books my lovers, hours my enemies and you the only story.
Nikita Gill
#74. I started out in life as a poet; I was only writing poetry all through my 20s. It wasn't until I was about 30 that I got serious about writing prose. While I was writing poems, I would often divert myself by reading detective novels; I liked them.
Paul Auster
#75. A precious, mouldering pleasure 't is
To meet an antique book,
In just the dress his century wore;
A privilege, I think.
Emily Dickinson
#76. If every head of state and every government official spent an hour a day reading poetry we'd live in a much more humane and decent world.
Mark Strand
#77. Reading poetry and reading the great works of the canon that we were reading in the '60s and the '70s and '80s was mind altering.
Anne Lamott
#78. I love reading all kinds of books. I usually have about ten books going at any one time - books about the past, the present, novels, non-fiction, poetry, mythology, religion, etc. Reading is my favorite thing to do.
Mary Pope Osborne
#79. I'd park myself in the bookstore and read with one eye on everyone coming in. I remember reading a Robert Bly book of poetry.
Sally Mann
#80. A fortress built long ago,
Walls made timeless by historic glory.
The small girl in the boat slows,
To listen to its story.
Rachel Lewis
#81. When you find it you become the secret addressee of a literary text and I felt that their reader had been left out of this experience of reading poetry or what the experience of poetry was.
Edward Hirsch
#82. That part of what I loved about poetry was how the distinction between fiction and nonfiction didn't obtain, how the correspondence between text and world was less important than the intensities of the poem itself, what possibilities of feeling were opened up in the present tense of reading.
Ben Lerner
#83. My advice to the reader approaching a poem is to make the mind still and blank. Let the poem speak. This charged quiet mimics the blank space ringing the printed poem, the nothing out of which something takes shape.
Camille Paglia
#84. An underestimated element in poetry, that reading aloud makes clear, is the pause. I mean especially the force of a pause or a couple of pauses close together, contrasted with a longer unit of grammar.
Robert Pinsky
#85. I wanted to be a poet. I had a really romantic idea about what that would mean. My parents knew some poets, and I liked how they dressed and acted, but I didn't really acknowledge that I only liked reading some bits of poetry while I was peeing or something.
Lena Dunham
#86. When you are old and grey and full of sleep
And nodding by the fire, take down this book,
And slowly read, and dream of the soft look
Your eyes had once, and of their shadows deep
W.B.Yeats
#87. I spend most of my time reading non-fiction of all sorts. Then poetry. Then fiction to blurb. Then fiction I want to read.
Jim Shepard
#88. I was just reading some poetry, and it talked about how things start as one thing and change into another, and I just thought, what a great concept for a song.
Tommy Lee
#89. There are distinct duties of a poet laureate. I plan a reading series at the Library of Congress and advise the librarian. The rest is how I want to promote poetry.
Rita Dove
#90. Most of humanity gets by without reading novels or poetry, and no one would deny the richness of their thoughts.
Ian McEwan
#91. I like cups of tea and reading books and poetry and old people things.
Bindi Irwin
#92. You'll want to read books - novels, because ladies are frivolous; poetry because ladies are sentimental; and sermons, because we are pious. If you must read essays, Mr. Emerson might be best. Your gentleman may have a nodding acquaintance with his works.
Donald McCaig
#93. Dreams, books, are each a world; and books, we know,
Are a substantial world, both pure and good:
Round these, with tendrils strong as flesh and blood,
Our pastime and our happiness will grow.
William Wordsworth
#94. Ocean waves gently rock the boat,
As if to the tune of a lullaby.
She sits still as the boat silently floats
Under the infinite blue sky.
Rachel Lewis
#95. 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.
Louis Aragon
#96. My dad is a Jack Nicholson lookalike and a frustrated performer, my mother's into reading and poetry. I suppose the thing I owe them most is my confidence.
Michael Sheen
#97. The terms of poetry - some simple, some complicated, some ancient, some new - should bring us closer to what we're hearing, enlarging our experience of it, enabling us to describe what we're reading, to feel and think with greater precision.
Edward Hirsch
#98. I can't remember the poem
That pierced through my heart
It was the saddest I heard
Of all truths ever spoken
It left a scar in me
A wound that doesn't heal
But the words are forgotten
So is a big part of me
A.A. Patawaran
#99. The library was open for one hour after school let out. I hid there, looking at art books and reading poetry.
Lynda Barry
#100. Sometimes poetry is inspired by the conversation entered into by reading other poems.
John Barton
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