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The subject of the poem usually dictates the rhythm or the rhyme and its form. Sometimes, when you finish the poem and you think the poem is finished, the poem says, "You're not finished with me yet," and you have to go back and revise, and you may have another poem altogether. It has its own life to live.
Maya AngelouWhat I try to do is to go into a poem - and one writes them, of course, poem by poem - to go into each poem, first of all without having any sense whatsoever of where it's going to end up
Paul MuldoonPoetry is poetry. My process is I try to write the best poem I can, in the best way to communicate whatever it is the poem is trying to communicate, and then I try to figure out the best way to present that poem to a live audience. It's all craft, just different stages of craft.
Bao PhiA good poem is not completely a poem until it has received a critical response that grows out of the poem in an almost biological way.
Michael LongleyThe poem springs from the half spoken words of the patient.... When asked, how I have for so many years continued an equal interest in medicine and the poem, I reply that they amount for me to nearly the same thing.
William Carlos WilliamsIf 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.
Kurt VonnegutSometimes 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.
Sarah KayI 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.
Billy CollinsIn the past I have declined to comment on my own work: because, it seems to me, a poem is what it is; because a poem is itself a definition, and to try to redefine it is to be apt to falsify it; and because the author is the person least able to consider his work objectively
James SchuylerBecause every book of art, be it a poem or a cupola, is understandably a self-portrait of its author, we won't strain ourselves too hard trying to distinguish between the author's persona and the poem's lyrical hero. As a rule, such distinctions are quite meaningless, if only because a lyrical hero is invariably an author's self-projection.
Joseph BrodskyPlagiarism 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.
Megan McCaffertyPoetry 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.
Sarah KayONCE WHEN I WAS ninth grade i had to write a paper on a poem. One of the lines was"If your eyes weren't open you wouldn't know the difference between dreaming and waking' It hadn't meant meant much to me at the time. After all there'd been a guy in the class that i liked so how could i be expected to pay attention to literary analysis? Now three year later i understand the poem perfectly.
Richelle MeadI 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.
Randall MannTranslation 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.
Marilyn HackerThe poem is the device through which the ordinary world is seen in a new way - engaging, compelling, even beautiful.
Ted KooserI never deny poems when they come; whatever I am doing, whatever I am writing, I lay it aside and attend to the arriving poem.
Amy LowellIf the poem can be improved by the author's explanations, it never should have been published.
Archibald MacLeishPoetry is sentimental to begin with. To write a sentimental poem is an act of redundancy.
Mary RuefleOrdering a man to write a poem is like commanding a pregnant woman to give birth to a red-headed child.
Carl SandburgTo 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!
Tristan TzaraPoetry is a way of being alone without feeling alone. It allows you to experience another mind, I suppose. And it does that more fully than other art forms, I think. It doesn't simply describe an experience, or a feeling, or a moment: it evokes it through, say, rhythm or tone or diction or metaphor. It creates a mood. A poem communicates before it is understood; it's not a fully paraphrasable form, which distinguishes it from other forms of writing.
Nick LairdThe first spoken word poem I ever wrote was when I was 14 and I wrote it because I was accidentally signed up for a teen poetry slam. Because I loved poetry I said that I'd try it out.
Sarah KayAbstract understanding doesn't mean arbitrary sloshing and messing. Abstract art is controlled visual magic based on laws and methodology. Abstraction generally involves implication, suggestion and mystery rather that obvious description. Like a good poem, a good abstraction attacks your feelings before your understanding. Abstraction within realism adds zest and excitement to otherwise dull subject matter. Abstract understanding takes time and patience.
Robert GennThe art and science of memory is about developing the capacity to quickly create images that link disparate ideas. Creativity is the ability to form similar connections between disparate images and to create something new and hurl it into the future so it becomes a poem, or a building, or a dance, or a novel. Creativity is, in a sense, future memory.
Joshua FoerHe said, "You have pigs in this poem; pigs are not poetic." I got up and walked out of that class and never went back.
Carolyn KizerHave endless patterns and repetitions accompanying your thoughtlessness, as if to say let go of that other more linear story, with its beginning, middle, and end, with its transcendent end, let go, we are the poem, we have come miles of life, we have survived this far to tell you, go on, go on.
Lidia YuknavitchListening 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.
Carlo RovelliWriting that gets rewritten as the earth moves. If you look at the sky that way, it's this massive shifting poem, or maybe a letter, first written by one author, and then, when the earth moves, annotated by another. So I stare and stare until, one day, I can read it.
Maria Dahvana HeadleySo writing about love or having it infuse the poems that I'm writing has never been something I've set myself to do, except when I write a poem for my wife, for an occasion, such as our anniversary.
Ron PadgettAnd for the authentical truth of either person or actions, who (worth the respecting) will expect it in a poem, whose subject is not truth, but things like truth? Poor envious souls they are that cavil at truth's want in these natural fictions; material instruction, elegant and sententious excitation to virtue, and deflection from her contrary, being the soul, limbs, and limits of an authentical tragedy.
George ChapmanI thought a bit of poetry might be interesting - I even write a few lines myself. I composed a short poem for my mum's 70th birthday recently. When I recited it I saw the glint of a tear in her eye...although I guess it wasn't the quality of the poetry was that making her cry!
Iain DowieI believe in fiction and the power of stories because that way we speak in tongues. We are not silenced. All of us, when in deep trauma, find we hesitate, we stammer; there are long pauses in our speech. The thing is stuck. We get our language back through the language of others. We can turn to the poem. We can open the book. Somebody has been there for us and deep-dived the words.
Jeanette WintersonWe 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.
Michel de MontaigneIt is well sometimes to half understand a poem in the same manner that we half understand the world.
Gilbert K. ChestertonOne will never again look at a birch tree, after the Robert Frost poem, in exactly the same way.
Paul MuldoonIf you can say the lyrics almost like a poem and they stand up, that's a great thing. Some songs have great lyrics and I don't like the melodies, and vice versa.
Harry Connick, Jr.A poem may be an instance of morality, of social conditions, of psychological history; it may instance all its qualities, but never one of them alone, nor any two or three; never less than all.
Allen TateOne day, I just got up to read a poem and started singing. I looked around - the reaction was great. And I said, oh, boy. I like this.
Jill ScottOne of the hardest things for me to do is be fully open in a poem. By that I mean, honest and not trying to amplify some mythological version of myself. I was a poor, geeky black kid in Indianapolis. There is nothing mythological about that. So to try to truly render the kind of economic and racial inequity I grew up in, I had to find a way to be more honest about what happened. And it wasn't fun to write, even though the poems aren't 100% autobiographical.
Adrian MatejkaLet 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.
Berenice AbbottPoetry is not a silent art. The poem must perform, unaided, in its reader's head. Educated readers give themselves a good performance. Educated listeners compare performance with text and with other performances. Good poets use the full resources of language.
Christopher Logue