I will be your poet, I will be more to you than to any of the rest.

Let yourself becoming living poetry

To be a poet is to be taller, to be bigger
Than men! It is to bite as if you’re kissing!
It is to give alms, although you are a beggar like
King of the Realm where only pain is missing!</p>It is to have a thousand desires for splendor
And do not even know what we want!
It is to have inside yourself a flaming star,
It is to have the condor’s mighty claw and wing! It is to be hungry, to be thirsty of Infinity!
By helmet, golden and satin mornings...
It is to condense the world into one lonely cry! And it is loving you, thus, hopelessly...
And it is you being soul, and blood, and life in me
And tell it singing to everyone!

A poem is a naked person....Some people say that I am a poet.

The poet should be responsible to the poem.

This is what you shall do: Love the earth and sun and the animals, despise riches, give alms to every one that asks, stand up for the stupid and crazy, devote your income and labor to others, hate tyrants, argue not concerning God, have patience and indulgence toward the people, take off your hat to nothing known or unknown, or to any man or number of men — go freely with powerful uneducated persons, and with the young, and with the mothers of families — re-examine all you have been told in school or church or in any book, and dismiss whatever insults your own soul; and your very flesh shall be a great poem, and have the richest fluency, not only in its words, but in the silent lines of its lips and face, and between the lashes of your eyes, and in every motion and joint of your body. The poet shall not spend his time in unneeded work. He shall know that the ground is already plough'd and manured; others may not know it, but he shall. He shall go directly to the creation. His trust shall master the trust of everything he touches — and shall master all attachment.

poetry to me is something sacred. If you want to be a poet, it’s very difficult. You have to listen to that voice, follow that voice. Never put poetry to the service of anything. No! We are at the service of poetry, and you have to read a lot to feed off of other poets. You have to get fed by other poets, to write all the time, even if it’s one line a day. You have to be disciplined and humble.

a poem is a naked person . . . some people say that I am a poet

You speak
As one who fed on poetry.

I consider myself a poet first and a musician second. I live like a poet and I'll die like a poet.

I am a poet largely because poetry verges closely on mythic power...The fool is the one who insists on his truth to the exclusion of others. And after all, truth, beauty, the very meaning of words-all these are relative values. This is the realm of poetry. However, you could also say that I am a poet as the result of laziness. I am too lazy to write more prose than I do. Prose is like making love to one woman instead of to fifty, which you can do with poetry...Writing should always be a pleasure, spontaneous-like making love.

To be a poet is to have a soul so quick to discern, that no shade of quality escapes it, and so quick to feel, that discernment is but a hand playing with finely-ordered variety on the chords of emotion — a soul in which knowledge passes instantaneously into feeling, and feeling flashes back as a new organ of knowledge.

We need food for the Soul We need poetry ... We deserve poetry

I'm a poet, and I know it.