Quotes About Poem

One day while studying a Yeats poem I decided to write poetry the rest of my life. I recognized that a single short poem has room for history, music, psychology, religious thought, mood, occult speculation, character, and events of one's own life. I still feel surprised that such various substances can find shelter and nourishment in a poem. A poem in fact may be a sort of nourishing liquid, such as one uses to keep an amoeba alive. If prepared right, a poem can keep an image or a thought or insights on history or the psyche alive for years, as well as our desires and airy impulses.

People I know who succeed don't mind working. Those who are competent seem to like doing things well -- not stopping because they haven't accomplished what they wanted to on the first go-round. They're willing to do it twenty times, if necessary. There's an illusion that the good people can easily do something, and it's not necessarily true. They're just determined to do it right. I was impressed by hearing one of the women at Radcliffe talk about writing a poem, how many revisions a single poem sometimes has to go through -- fifty or sixty revisions to come out with a poem sixteen lines long.

Readers bring their own experiences, their own range of - their own wisdom, their own knowledge, their own insights to poem and the meaning of a poem takes place in the negotiation between the poet, the poem and the reader.

I want to reiterate that my understanding of the poem is not the poem's core, true meaning. Once a poem goes out into the world, the poet is just one more reader.

I have never started a poem yet whose end I knew. Writing a poem is discovering.

If you read quickly to get through a poem to what it means, you have missed the body of the poem.

I've always been intrigued with the male characters in novels like 'Pride and Prejudice' such as Mr. Darcy, and this poem is part of a series of poems that explore desire and obsessions. The poems have been sitting in a drawer for a few years, so I decided to dust them off and work on them again since I have not written a new poem in more than three years. I'm not sure anything will become of the series, but at least it gives me something to work on in a period where I feel very uncreative.

I dropped my hoe and ran into the house and started to write this poem, 'End of Summer.’ It began as a celebration of wild geese. Eventually the geese flew out of the poem, but I like to think they left behind the sound of their beating wings.

Then I found another one, grandpa's poem. It turned out it had been written by Emily Brontë and it wasn't my grandfather's poem at all, although my response to it, I think, was pretty much the same, I just had the author wrong.

Sometimes I am puzzling over something for months and months and the poem gets created in small bursts and rewritten a hundred times, and chopped up and put back together, etc. Occasionally, though rarely, a poem just plops out of my head fully-formed. But always it is a blueprint of what my brain is trying to navigate at that moment.

Each poem seems to demand its own formal approach. In both drafting and revision, I'll play around with line lengths and stanza formations, eventually letting the poem settle into what I think is its own best form.

Whenever I read a poem that moves me, I know I'm not alone in the world. I feel a connection to the person who wrote it, knowing that he or she has gone through something similar to what I've experienced, or felt something like what I have felt. And their poem gives me hope and courage, because I know that they survived, that their life force was strong enough to turn experience into words and shape it into meaning and then bring it toward me to share.

Sometimes you finish the poem, and that last piece clicks in place. Sometimes the poem is finished with you.

Have it compose a poem -- a poem about a haircut! But lofty, noble, tragic, timeless, full of love, treachery, retribution, quiet heroism in the face of certain doom! Six lines, cleverly rhymed, and every word beginning with the letter s!

The poem is lonely. It is lonely and en route. Its author stays with it. Does this very fact not place the poem already here, at its inception, in the encounter, in the mystery of encounter?

Durable, memorable poetry is usually alert to complexity. A really good poem gives you a reason to read it 20 times, because the language in a good poem is doing a lot of work emotionally and a lot of work intellectually. That means durable poetry can help us think about complexity, can help us resist easy answers and help us step back. And it can help us sometimes calm down, and sometimes it can help us stay upset.

Poetry is like a puzzle-solving strategy for me. I like to poem my way through tricky questions and ideas. That's about the only consistent thread through my poem-creation process.

My theory is that poems are written because of a state of emotional irritation. It may be present for some time before the poet is conscious of what is tormenting him. The emotional irritation springs, probably, from subconscious combinations of partly forgotten thoughts and feelings. Coming together, like electrical currents in a thunder storm, they produce a poem. ... the poem is written to free the poet from an emotional burden.

I was walking every morning, and I'd take my iPod and paper and pen. As I walked, I wrote a poem, and then I'd come home - and sometimes it's legible, sometimes not - I typed the poem up. So I have a new, yet to be published, collection of poems now. It's called Walker's Alphabet, and among other things, it is about walking. My most recent collection of poems in 2010, incidentally, was titled WALKING backwards.

Translation makes me look at how a poem is put together in a different way, without the personal investment of the poem I'm writing myself, but equally closely technically.

Every poem is an infant labored into birth and I am drenched with sweating effort, tired from the pain and hurt of being a man, in the poem I transform myself into a woman.

As a poet I would say everything should be able to come into a poem but I can't put toothbrushes in a poem. I really can't.

From the beginning I felt that I didn't ever want to leave the impression that the process of writing a poem is totally mysterious. I couldn't explain everything that went on in the creation of a poem, but I could try to explain as much as I knew. I thought readers deserved that. I didn't want to set myself apart as being someone special.

Baudelaire's L'Héautontimorouménos was long seen to be a sexual sadomasochistic poem, it is now generally accepted that the poem is about writing poetry.

There's always an added element of a poem when it's read aloud because then you can really hear the rhythm, and the cadence, and even the pronunciation sometimes adds another layer to the poem.

A poem is not an expression, nor is it an object. Yet it somewhat partakes of both. What a poem is is never to be known, for which I have learned to be grateful.

I never deny poems when they come; whatever I am doing, whatever I am writing, I lay it aside and attend to the arriving poem.

A poem doesn’t come out and tell you what it has to say. It circles back on itself, eating its own tail and making you guess what it means.

If the poem can be improved by the author's explanations, it never should have been published.

The figure a poem makes. It begins in delight and ends in wisdom.

When I cannot write a poem, I bake biscuits and feel just as pleased.

Listening a cultivated person of today that jokes and almost boasts about his scientific ignorance, is as sad as listening a scientist that boasts about not having read any poem.

I'll tell you something. Once I was very fond of a poem by Emily Dickinson or somebody. I only remember one line of it, but it goes, 'The soul selects her own society.' I used to tell it to everybody. Once I quoted it to a friend of mine, and he said, 'Maybe, but the body gets thrown into bed with the goddamnedest people.

The writing of a poem is like a child throwing stones into a mineshaft. You compose first, then you listen for the reverberation.

I think that the casual reader and the lyric and confession are trickily tied up together. I mean often when I read my students' poems my first impulse is to say, "O, the subject of this pronoun, this 'I,' is whatever kid wrote this poem." The audience for lyric poems is "confessionalized" to some extent. And I think this audience tends to find long narrative poems, for instance, kind of bewildering.

I wanted to write; I sought all possible paths of personal liberation, but I could never sacrifice a living instant of life for the sake of a line to be written, my balance for the sake of a manuscript, a storm within me for the sake of a poem. I loved life itself too much for this.

In a poem the words should be as pleasing to the ear as the meaning is to the mind.

What I love about drafts is the experimental nature of them. The draft is what you know about writing a poem running up against what you don't know about the subject. If you're lucky, you get to surprise yourself.

We have more poets than judges and interpreters of poetry. It is easier to write an indifferent poem than to understand a good one. There is, indeed, a certain low and moderate sort of poetry, that a man may well enough judge by certain rules of art; but the true, supreme, and divine poesy is equally above all rules and reason. And whoever discerns the beauty of it with the most assured and most steady sight sees no more than the quick reflection of a flash of lightning.

A poem is a private story, after all, no matter how apparently public. The reader is always overhearing a confession.

A good poem looks life straight in the face, unflinching, sincere, equal to revelation through loss or gain.

I'm trying to find these rare moments where you feel completely illuminated. Facts never illuminate you. The phone directory of Manhattan doesn't illuminate you, although it has factually correct entries, millions of them. But these rare moments of illumination that you find when you read a great poem, you instantly know. You instantly feel this spark of illumination. You are almost stepping outside of yourself and you see something sublime.

But in reading great literature I become a thousand men and yet remain myself. Like the night sky in the Greek poem, I see with a myriad eyes, but it is still I who see. Here, as in worship, in love, in moral action, and in knowing, I transcend myself; and am never more myself than when I do.

Paul Valery speaks of the 'une ligne donnee' of a poem. One line is given to the poet by God or by nature, the rest he has to discover for himself.

Let us first say what photography is not. A photograph is not a painting, a poem, a symphony, a dance. It is not just a pretty picture, not an exercise in contortionist techniques and sheer print quality. It is or should be a significant document, a penetrating statement, which can be described in a very simple term-selectivity.

One way poetry connects is across time. . . . Some echo of a writer's physical experience comes into us when we read her poem.

A poem in my opinion, is opposed to a work of science by having for its immediate object, pleasure, not truth.

that your power of command with simple language was one of the magnificent things of our century. (from the poem: result)