10 Great Quotes About Poetry, Writing, and Art by Marie Howe

“Poetry is telling something to someone.”

“That’s the great thing about poetry. It’s worthless in the commodified world and doesn’t belong to anybody. That what is so precious, one of that last things that can’t be sold. Learn poems by heart, and then take them across borders. Put them in your wallet, on your refrigerator, carry them around-that’s what I’ve done all my life! Cut out poems and carry them around. I didn’t have to ask permission, the poem belongs to the world-this gift is one of the last examples that shows how art belongs to all of us.”

“I think poetry is one of the last places where the inner life of someone is held sacred. How it feels to be alive is held sacred. That reading it is a sacrament. Writing it-when one is in the right attitude and position, whether it fails or succeeds-is a kind of sacrament.”

“Poetry stops us and gives us something in common. I still believe that we could get poetry more into the public world. Unfortunately a lot of people believe they can’t read poetry because they were taught in school that it was difficult. Some poems are difficult, but many are not and so people are afraid-they don’t know where to go they don’t know what to do. I feel like we have to ambush them with something to realize that they don’t need to do anything more than just read and they’ll receive it.”

“A poem occurs when it actually is an experience, not the record of an experience. It’s when the writing itself brings me somewhere I never thought I would go, and there’s a discovery in the writing.”

“Poetry to me is oral; it really should be said out loud.”

“The great thing about art is that art helps us to let our hearts break open, rather than close. Everybody has known unimaginable moments of loneliness. Everyone we know has known pain and fear. And yet art can help us open to those moments rather than shut to those moments.”

“Every poem holds the unspeakable inside it. The unsayable… The thing that 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.”

“We tell each other stories to help each other live. That’s why I read poetry. I read poetry to stay alive. That’s why I went to poetry in the first place, that’s why I stay with it, that’s why I’ll never leave it.”

“Poetry saved my life-growing up and finding poems that reflected back to me psychological and emotional states that I was confronting. It’s an art that addresses the truth that we are living and dying at the same time. What could be stranger than that?”

—Marie Howe