As a direct line to human feeling, empathic experience, genuine language and detail, poetry is everything that headline news is not. It takes us inside situations, helps us imagine life from more than one perspective, honors imagery and metaphor - those great tools of thought - and deepens our confidence in a meaningful world.
Interpretation
Poetry offers a deeper understanding of human emotions and experiences, contrasting with the superficiality of headline news.
This quote emphasizes the unique role of poetry in capturing and exploring the complexities of human emotions and life experiences. Unlike headline news, which often presents a shallow overview of events, poetry invites readers to engage with diverse perspectives, immerse themselves in rich imagery, and appreciate the nuances of meaning, ultimately fostering a greater confidence in the significance of the world around us.
In practice
This quote can be used in a classroom discussion about the importance of literature in understanding human experiences.
It is really hard to be lonely very long in a world of words. Even if you don't have friends somewhere, you still have language, and it will find you and wrap its little syllables around you and suddenly there will be a story to live in.
I am looking for the human who admits his flaws Who shocks the adversary By being kinder not stronger What would that be like? We don't even know
I love the solitude of reading. I love the deep dive into someone else's story, the delicious ache of a last page.
A boy told me if he roller-skated fast enough his loneliness couldn't catch up to him, the best reason I ever heard for trying to be a champion. What I wonder tonight pedaling hard down King William Street is if it translates to bicycles. A victory! To leave your loneliness panting behind you on some street corner while you float free into a cloud of sudden azaleas, pink petals that have never felt loneliness, no matter how slowly they fell.
I think whenever you love something or somebody it means that you have to extend yourself, you have to grow - get a little larger. You can't stay in your little comfortable - spot.
I support all people on earth who have bodies like and unlike my body.
Drawing takes time. A line has time in it
All stories must end so, with the next tale winking out of the corners of the last pages, promising more, promising moonlight and dancing and revels, if only you will come back when spring comes again.
I'd been painting rats for three years before someone said 'that's clever it's an anagram of art' and I had to pretend I'd known that all along.
Some people ask, 'How do you attract the young and so many different people when your poetry is complicated and different?' I say, 'My accomplishment is that my readers trust me and accept my suggestions for change.'
I really admire stand-up, and I think I would have loved to learn how to do it. I think it's terrifying and thrilling. A really cool thing to do. It's a dying art, in a way.
Few occupations pass the solitary hours more fruitfully than the playing of a musical instrument.
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