I've always felt that poetry was particularly erotic, more than prose was... I say that you read poems not with your eyes and not with your ears, but with your mouth. You taste it.
Sentiment: POSITIVE
I love poetry; it's my primary literary interest, and I suppose the kind of reading you do when you are reading poems - close reading - can carry over into how you read other things.
I've been surprised to learn how many people love poetry. It's beautiful to see that people want poetry in their lives.
At school, I was never given a sense that poetry was something flowery or light. It's a complex and controlled way of using language. Rhythms and the music of it are very important. But the difficulty is that poetry makes some kind of claim of honesty.
Many of my poems are not sexual.
It is my belief that many who think they dislike poetry are really poetical in their natures and are indebted to it, more than they imagine, for the success they may have achieved, even in practical pursuits, and for the enjoyment their lives have afforded them.
Poetry for me is as much a spiritual practice as sexual ecstasy is.
The beautiful feeling after writing a poem is on the whole better even than after sex, and that's saying a lot.
Poetry is a vocal art for me - but not necessarily a performative one. It might be reading to oneself or recalling some lines by memory.
I don't think I've ever read poetry, ever.
Writing poetry makes you intensely conscious of how words sound, both aloud and inside the head of the reader. You learn the weight of words and how they sound to the ear.