Quotes About Poem

My advice to the reader approaching a poem is to make the mind still and blank. Let the poem speak. This charged quiet mimics the blank space ringing the printed poem, the nothing out of which something takes shape.

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

When you're really caught up in writing a poem, it can be a form of prayer. I'm not very good at praying, but what I experience when I'm writing a poem is close to prayer. I feel it in different degrees and not with every poem. But in certain ways writing is a form of prayer.

It's difficult to put your own bare ass out on the limb every time you sit down to write a poem. But that's really sort of the ideal. Because if we don't discover something about ourselves and our world in the making of a poem, chances are it's not going to be a very good poem. So what I'm saying is that a lot of our best poets could be better poets if they wrote less and risked more in what they do.

The impulse to create begins - often terribly and fearfully - in a tunnel of silence. Every real poem is the breaking of an existing silence, and the first question we might ask any poem is, What kind of voice is breaking silence, and what kind of silence is being broken?

To declaim freedom verses seems like a poem within a poem; freedom requires guns, it requires arms, but no feet.

The beginner hugs his infant poem to him and does not want it to grow up. But you may have to break your poem to remake it.

[The publication of his first poem] was wonderful ... but it taught me early on that the only thing that really matters is writing the next poem. Publication is best seen as a happy accident.

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.

A poem has a certain - a different time. For instance, a poem is a very private experience, and it doesn't have a driving tempo. In other words, you know, you can go back and forward; you can comeback; you can linger. You know, it's a completely different time reference.

In seventh grade I had a magical teacher, her name was Mrs. Fried. She wore only pink, she drove a pink Mustang, and she was half out of her head. But very inspiring. And one day she said, "Take out a paper and pen and write something about peace." For some reason I wrote a poem on Noah - I don't know why I chose Noah - and it turned out it was for a contest for the UN. I ended up winning and reading the poem in front of the UN. I remember Mrs. Fried telling me, "When you write your first book, dedicate it to me." That was like, "Whoa."

I've spent much of my life being attuned to watching for an image or a phrase that can trigger what might be a poem - could become a poem.

The poet must not only write the poem but must scrutinize the world intensely, or anyway that part of the world he or she has taken for subject. If the poem is thin, it is likely so not because the poet does not know enough words, but because he or she has not stood long enough among the flowers--has not seen them in any fresh, exciting, and valid way.

Before you go further, let me tell you what a poem brings, first, you must know the secret, there is no poem to speak of, it is a way to attain a life without boundaries.

I'm always writing towards a discovery. When I'm writing poems in particular, I'm often writing because a few images coalesced in my mind and I thought, "I wonder why these images are abrading against each other. I wonder what happens if put them in a poem and explore them." I'm trying to learn something every time I write a poem.

When words become a poem, it makes sense to me, but I don't know how to explain to someone why the words are the way they are. It's just the logic of the poem to me.

A poem compresses much in a small space and adds music, thus heightening its meaning. The city is like poetry: it compresses all life, all races and breeds, into a small island and adds music and the accompaniment of internal engines. The island of Manhattan is without any doubt the greatest human concentrate on earth, the poem whose magic is comprehensible to millions of permanent residents but whose full meaning will always remain elusive.

All the translations of a poem in all possible languages may add nuance to nuance and, by a kind of mutual retouching, by correcting one another, may give an increasingly faithful picture of the poem they translate, yet they will never give the inner meaning of the original.

In a play, certainly, the subject is of more importance than in any other work of art. Infelicity, triviality, vagueness of subject, may be outweighed in a poem, a novel, or a picture, by charm of manner, by ingenuity of execution; but in a drama the subject is of the essence of the work-it is the work. If it is feeble, the work can have no force; if it is shapeless, the work must be amorphous.

She moved like a poem and smiled like a sphinx.

The poem is not a thing we see; it is, rather, a light by which we may see.

...then he looked at my T-shirt and saw Byron's picture on it and he quoted "She Walks in Beauty," which is like my favorite poem next to the one by Baudelaire about his girlfriend being nothing but worm food, except that Lily called that one first because Baudelaire is her fave poet and so she got the shirt with him on it, even though Byron is way more scrumptious and I would do him on sharp gravel if I had the chance. --from The Chronicles of Abby Normal

Don’t you love quotations? I am immensely fond of them; a certain proof of erudition.... [I]f you should happen to write an insipid poem... send it to me, and my fiat shall crown you with immortality.

Remember picture books are the closest form of writing to a poem. Even though they don't have to rhyme, they must be poetic. They must be written so the worst actress can read with comfort and expression.

Writing a poem ... is a kind of possible love affair between something like the heart (that courageous but also shy factory of emotion) and the learned skills of the conscious mind.

I would feel dead if I didn't have the ability periodically to put my world in order with a poem. I think to be inarticulate is a great suffering, and is especially so to anyone who has a certain knack for poetry.

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

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

The great poem must have the stamp of greatness as well as its essence.

Yes, there is a Nirvanah; it is leading your sheep to a green pasture, and in putting your child to sleep, and in writing the last line of your poem

Like a piece of ice on a hot stove the poem must ride on its own melting.

when a poem says something that could not have been said in any other way, in music, prose, sculpture, movement or paint, then it is poetry.

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

The poet should try to give his poem the quiet swiftness of flame, so that the reader will feel and not think while he is reading. But the thinking will come afterwards.

Beauty is the sole legitimate province of the poem.

[Kenneth Koch] taught children in public schools in New York City to write poems and told them down worry about rhyming, don't worry about any of that stuff. You know, write a poem where you mention three colors and make it five lines - or he would just give them, you know, little strategies. And, man, they wrote some great poems.

For me, the short story is not a character sketch, a mouse trap, an epiphany, a slice of suburban life. It is the flowering of a symbol center. It is a poem grafted onto sturdier stock.

I wasn't quite used to writing a diary - I didn't understand why people did it - but I wrote down notes and they went into a poem.

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

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.

As a guiding principle I believe that every poem must be its own sole freshly created universe, and therefore have no belief n 'tradition' or a common myth-kitty or casual allusions in poems to other poems or poets, which last I find unpleasantly like the talk of literary understrappers letting you see they know the right people.

My favourite poem is the one that starts 'Thirty days hath September' because it actually tells you something.

If a poem hasn't ripped apart your soul; you haven't experienced poetry.

One of my earliest memories as a reader - I don't know how old I was, quite young - was a poem of his, called "Fog," and I remember the first verse, "The fog comes / on little cat feet".

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.

If I'm not writing a poem to decompress from my experiences on a movie set, I usually just cook and it's like meditative. Especially since I'm at the stage now where I don't really use measuring cups. Kind of instinctual, I just kind of prepare my own dishes as I go along.

When Cynthia smiles, said young Bingo, the skies are blue; the world takes on a roseate hue; birds in the garden trill and sing, and Joy is king of everything, when Cynthia smiles. He coughed, changing gears. When Cynthia frowns - What the devil are you talking about?I'm reading you my poem. The one I wrote to Cynthia last night. I'll go on, shall I?No!No?No. I haven't had my tea.

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.'