Quotes About Poem

Poetry is perhaps the oldest art form. We can go back to an age-old idea of naming things, the Adamic impulse - to give something a name has always been an immensely powerful thing. To name something is to own it, to capture it. A poem is still a kind of spell, an incantation. Historically, a poem also invoked: it was a blessing, or a curse, or a charm. It had a motile power, was able to summon something into being. A poem is a special kind of speech-act. In a good poem there's the trance-like effect of language in its most concentrated, naked form.

I began composing the next poem, the one that was to be written next. Not the last poem of those I had read, but the poem written in the head of someone who may never have existed but who had certainly written another poem nonetheless, and just never had the chance to commit it to ink and the page.

The poet must work with brush and paper,but this is not what makes the poem. A man does not go in search of a poem - the poem comes in search of him.

The "truth" is the poem itself. Just because someone writes a poem about a feeling she has does not mean that the feeling will stay forever. The truth of the emotion of the poem remains, even if the particular truth of the poet changes.

In high school I was leafing through an anthology that our teachers had given up and I found a poem, I go, "That's so strange. This poem looks so much like my grandfather's poem."

The poem is a cry of the unborn heart. Yes, because the poem perfectly embodies the world, there is no world without poem.

It has been said that a poem should not mean but be. This is not quite accurate. In a poem, as distinct from many other kinds of verbal societies, meaning and being are identical. A poem might be called a pseudo-person. Like a person, it is unique and addresses the reader personally. On the other hand, like a natural being and unlike a historical person, it cannot lie.

A poem is true if it hangs together. Information points to something else. A poem points to nothing but itself.

If you want to really hurt you parents, and you don't have the nerve to be gay, the least you can do is go into the arts. I'm not kidding. The arts are not a way to make a living. They are a very human way of making life more bearable. Practicing an art, no matter how well or badly, is a way to make your soul grow, for heaven's sake. Sing in the shower. Dance to the radio. Tell stories. Write a poem to a friend, even a lousy poem. Do it as well as you possible can. You will get an enormous reward. You will have created something.

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.

At the very beginning when I begin writing a poem I try not to think of the audience or anyone at all except for trying to get at the very center of what is driving that poem. In a way it's like analyzing myself.

I think what gets a poem going is an initiating line. Sometimes a first line will occur, and it goes nowhere; but other times - and this, I think, is a sense you develop - I can tell that the line wants to continue. If it does, I can feel a sense of momentum - the poem finds a reason for continuing.

I have experienced healing through other writers' poetry, but there's no way I can sit down to write in the hope a poem will have healing potential. If I do, I'll write a bad poem.

The knowledge that it takes to write a poem gets burnt up in the writing of the poem.

Historically, there are hierarchies of purity. Certain aspects of poetry are very, very pure. The lyric poem can't be anything but the lyric poem.

Plagiarism has been around far longer than the Internet. In fact, I had a poem published in 'Seventeen' magazine when I was 15 years old. About a year later I was informed that there was a girl who used that same poem to win a statewide poetry competition in Alabama. It took months for people to put together that this had happened.

In a poem, the words happen; they just come. I let them. Otherwise, I wouldn't write. To interfere with what is happening is to distort the poem. Just a very small degree of intelligence and supervision is necessary. Very tactful. Any revision later that violates the text as it came, that begins rewriting the words, is fake.

The speaker tentatively reaches out with that feeling and realizes that it's kind of absurd, or at least a dangerous consolation, which is what I think is discovered as that longish sentence at the end of the poem comes to its conclusion. But here I am interpreting my own poem, which is kind of like making out with one's own high school yearbook photo.

I have always wanted to midcourse-correct (or undermine) in a poem, and let that be the turn. That poem is to do with displacement, with almosts - even the rhymes are intentionally off.

A page with a poem on it is less attractive than a page with a poem on it and some tea stains.

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.

If it ain't a pleasure, it ain't a poem.

... woman is frequently praised as the more "creative" sex. She does not need to make poems, it is argued; she has no drive to make poems, because she is privileged to make babies. A pregnancy is as fulfilling as, say, Yeats' Sailing to Byzantium.... To call a child a poem may be a pretty metaphor, but it is a slur on the labor of art.

To read a poem in January is as lovely as to go for a walk in June

Straight photography, following the medium, is intoxicating - trying to wrestle it into the form of a poem.

For me a true poem is on the way when I begin to be haunted, when it seems as if I were being asked an inescapable question by an angel with whom I must wrestle to get at the answer.

To make a poem, take one newspaper, one pair of scissors, snip the words one by one and put them in a bag. Shake gently, draw them out at random, and copy them conscientiously... DADA est mort. DADA est idiot. Vive DADA!

Sometimes a poem starts because I feel the urge to write about something from which I carry a great deal of shame, and I try to sketch out in writing how I am complicit in whatever dynamic it is I am illuminating. And sometimes it comes later, when I step back and challenge myself - am I being honest here?

With several different kinds of poetry to choose from, a man would decide that he would like best to be an epic poet, and he would set out, in conscious determination, on an epic poem.

A poem can use anything to talk about anything.

A poem is something sacred. Let no one Take it for anything except itself.

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.

Let your poem be kept nine years.

To me, a poem is almost like someone whispering to another person, or you hear the whispering in your head. I hope with my own poems that the reader feels a connection, soul to soul, that'll help us all feel a little less alone on the planet. And it does have the power to direct change. A writer can make the word 'dark' be something positive. You can relieve a word like 'hysterical' of its misogynistic implications. You can make the language your own. That's what poetry is about.

The ingredients that make a good poem often differ from those that make a good essay and from those that make a good novel.

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.

There was a very cautious man Who never laughed or played He never risked, he never tried, He never sang or prayed. And when he on day passed away, His insurance was denied, For since he never really lived, They claimed he never really died. (Anonymous poem)

I have no desire to dress up my poetry and make it fancy. I want the poem to be as true as humanly possible to the feeling that inspired it. That's my only concern. Everything else seems wrong.

Anybody doesn't like these pitchers don't like potry, see? Anybody don't like potry go home see television shots of big hatted cowboys being tolerated by kind horses. Robert Frank, Swiss, unobtrusive, nice, with that little camera that he raises and snaps with one hand he sucked a sad poem right out of America onto film, taking rank among the poets of the world. To Robert Frank I now give this message: You got eyes.

A poem is a small machine made of words. . .Its movement is intrinsic, undulant, a physical more than a literary character.

A poem is a place where the conditions of beyondness and withinness are made palpable, where to imagine is to feel what it is to be. It allows us to have the life we are denied because we are too busy living. Even more paradoxically, poetry permits us to live in ourselves as if we were just out of reach of ourselves.

One will never again look at a birch tree, after the Robert Frost poem, in exactly the same way.

For me, the Bild-Dichtung [image-poem] is the ideal form, because the drawing process is constantly being interrupted or contrasted by the writing. And since I always have something to say when I am writing, the effort has a balancing effect. Drawing and writing are wonderful complements.

A poem is like a child; at some point we have to let it go and trust that it will make its own way in the world.

With a poem you can say 'I got my feeling into words for myself. I now have the equivalent in words for that much of what I have felt.'

A poem with grandly conceived and executed stanzas, such as one of Keats's odes, should be like an enfilade of rooms in a palace: one proceeds, with eager anticipation, from room to room.

Just as a new scientific discovery manifests something that was already latent in the order of nature, and at the same time is logically related to the total structure of the existing science, so the new poem manifests something that was already latent in the order of words.