“Poetry is what looks like poetry, what sounds like poetry. It is metrical composition.”

“Your friend's poetry is terrible," he said.
Clary blinked, caught momentarily off guard. "What?"
"I said his poetry was terrible. It sounds like he ate a dictionary and started vomiting up words at random.”

“Poetry is I say essentially a vocabulary just as prose is essentially not. And what is the vocabulary of which poetry absolutely is. It is a vocabulary based on the noun as prose is essentially and determinately and vigorously not based on the noun. Poetry is concerned with using with abusing, with losing with wanting with denying with avoiding with adoring with replacing the noun. It is doing that always doing that, doing that doing nothing but that. Poetry is doing nothing but using losing refusing and pleasing and betraying and caressing nouns. That is what poetry does, that is what poetry has to do no matter what kind of poetry it is. And there are a great many kinds of poetry. So that is poetry really loving the name of anything and that is not prose.”

“I know what his poetry will be about. What poetry is always about. The cruelty of the poet's mistress.”

“Compose aloud: poetry is a sound.”

“A teacher (of poetry) has to know and feel what poetry is, and be able - and this is crucial- to read it aloud effectively.”

“Sound poetry is a fusion of music and literature.”

“What can be explained is not poetry.”

“Sandburg is unreadable today only because of the way he wrote. His prose was bad poetry, like his poetry.”

“What you have to realize when you write poetry, or if you love poetry, is that poetry is just naturally the greatest god damn thing that ever was in the whole universe”