Quotes About Poem

A poem is a flexible thing, and a poem is a poem.

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."

I never think of my audience when I write a poem. I try to write out of whatever is haunting me; in order for a poem to feel authentic, I have to feel I'm treading on very dangerous ground, which can mean that the resulting revelations may prove hurtful to other people. The time for thinking about that kind of guilt or any collective sense of responsibility, however, occurs much later in the creative process, after the poem is finished.

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.

Poetry is like a portrait of a moment or person, and the poem is almost like looking at a photograph; it slaps you in the face and kisses you at the same time. Nothing else does that, with that brevity. Songs try to do it, but that's three minutes. A poem, you read it and it kind of changes your life and you don't know how it happened and you can never forget it. It's like the best song lyric, the best line from a film-everything in the world that's short and great put together.

To do a poem justice, explain what makes it unique; to get a poem noticed, explain what makes it typical.

You must believe a poem is a holy thing, a good poem, that is.

I like the dance between sustained focus and digression that the long poem invites. A controlling metaphor helps to sustain the long poem.

A good athlete can enter a state of body-awareness in which the right stroke or the right movement happens by itself, effortlessly, without any interference of the conscious will. This is a paradigm for non-action: the purest and most effective form of action. The game plays the game; the poem writes the poem; we can't tell the dancer from the dance. It happens when we trust the intelligence of the universe in the same way that an athlete or a dancer trusts the superior intelligence of the body.

Two opposing forces inhabit the poem: one of elevation or up-rooting, which pulls the word from the language: the other of gravity, which makes it return. The poem is an original and unique creation, but it is also reading and recitation: participation. The poet creates it; the people, by recitation, re-create it. Poet and reader are two moments of a single reality.

I have taught the long poem off and on for years. The more book-length poems I read and studied and taught the more interested I was in the possibilities in writing a poetry that applied formal and substantive options of narrative and non-narrative, lyric and non-lyric. I found many pleasures in this kind of writing. The long poem is as old as the art form.

Because 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.

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.

The most common mistake students of literature make is to go straight for what the poem or novel says, setting aside the way that it says it. To read like this is to set aside the ‘literariness’ of the work – the fact that it is a poem or play or novel, rather than an account of the incidence of soil erosion in Nebraska.

The 'idea' for the poem, which may come as an image thrown against memory, as a sound of words that sets off a traveling of sound and meaning, as a curve of emotion (a form) plotted by certain crises of events or image or sound, or as a title which evokes a sense of inner relations; this is the first 'surfacing' of the poem. Then a period of stillness may follow.

The poem is not only the point of origin for all the language and narrative arts, the poem returns us to the very social function of art as such.

If you can explain a poem, it is not a poem. Poetry has to be inexplicable.

Every poem holds the unspeakable inside it. The unsayable... The thing that you can't really say because it's too complicated. It's too complex for us. Every poem has that silence deep in the center of it.

I'm never quite sure how the poem is going to resolve itself and that I'm always in some way surprised. I make a discovery in a poem as I write it.

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.

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.

I sometimes talk about the making of a poem within the poem.

Men are so inclined to content themselves with what is commonest; the spirit and the senses so easily grow dead to the impressions of the beautiful and perfect, that every one should study, by all methods, to nourish in his mind the faculty of feeling these things. ...For this reason, one ought every day at least, to hear a little song, read a good poem, see a fine picture, and, if it were possible, to speak a few reasonable words.

To begin with, I wanted that truth to life to possess a concrete reliability, and rejoiced most when the poem seemed most direct, an upfront representation of the world it stood in for or stood up for or stood its ground against.

Choose Life over the other stuff. Get out of your head. Live. Dress up. Eat. Touch people. Help out. Give up. Love people. Give your best away. There’s more. What’s the problem? Relax. You’re going to die. Throw a party. Eat off my plate. Sing to me. Meet me in the bedroom. Get a massage. Give one. Let your amazement out into the room. Pry open the box you hide your joy in. Be a poem.

All of us , I believe , carry about in our heads places and landscapes we shall never forget because we have experienced such intensity of life there :places where, like the child that 'feels its life in every limb' in Wordsworth's poem'We are seven' ,our eyes have opened wider, and all our senses have somehow heightened.By way of returning the compliment , we accord these places that have given us such joy a special place in our memories and imaginations. They live on in us, wherever we may be, however far from them.

There is no one who can stop you; you find a mic, a crowd, a set of ears, and nowadays, a camera and YouTube, and you recite your poem. You have your say. I don't want to over-romanticize it: of course, any time an art form ascends, especially when competition is involved, there will be gatekeeping, chauvinism, and other unfortunate dynamics. But the beauty of spoken word and performance poetry is, by and large, its ability to reach people in the moment - right there, right then.

O Lord, may I never want to look good. O Jesus, may I always read it all: out loud and the very way it should be. May I never look at the other findings until I have come to my own true conclusions: May I care for the least of the young: and become aware of the one poem that each may have written; may I be aware of what each thing is, delighted with form, and wary of the false comparison; may I never use the word "brilliant."

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.

Have 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.

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.

So much of our lives depends on accidents of birth, time, and geography. This haunts me. In some lives, few "or"s are possible. The pain of that is behind the second stanza of this poem.

I think that when a poem can move readers across generations and across its specific class or race then it becomes truly classic.

So 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.

But in a lot of ways my poems are very conventional, and it's no big deal for me to write a poem in either free verse or strict form; modern poets can, and do, do both.

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.

Our moments of inspiration are not lost though we have no particular poem to show for them; for those experiences have left an indelible impression, and we are ever and anon reminded of them.

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

If I have some extra words and I'm trying to make it fit into that shape, then I just sort of take out the extra words, almost like a sculptor would take a piece of granite. It's almost like cutting out the words that aren't needed in order to make it a stronger poem and still say exactly what I want it to say.

Instead of noting down things I’m unlikely to forget, I will write a poem. Even if I have never written one before and even if I never do so again, I will at least know that I once had the courage to put my feelings into words.

And your eyes must do some raining if you're ever gonna grow / When crying don't help, you can't compose yourself / It's best to compose a poem, an honest verse of longing / Or a simple song of hope.

I had been thinking about the question, "What do I love about America?" I kept coming back to this idea of community and home, which already obsessed me in my work. But I couldn't quite figure out how to lead beyond my immediate experience. Then I was just standing at the kitchen sink, and I watched the sun rise, and I thought, "How many hundreds of thousands of people are watching the same sun rise right now?" I just knew the poem would go from that line.

Like every other form of art, literature is no more and nothing less than a matter of life and death. The only question worth asking about a story — or a poem, or a piece of sculpture, or a new concert hall — is, Is it dead or alive?

I've been thinking about it, and that poem, that guy that wrote it, he meant you're gold when you're a kid, like green. When you're a kid everything's new, dawn. It's just when you get used to everything that it's day. Like the way you dig sunsets, Pony. That's gold. Keep that way, it's a good way to be.

A poem should not mean but be.

I accept all interpretations of my films. The only reality is before the camera. Each film I make is kind of a return to poetry for me, or at least an attempt to create a poem.

The poem has to bear the weight with image, language... the screenplay with dialogue, plot.

Some of my pictures are poem-like in the sense that they are very condensed, haiku-lik. There are others that, if they were poetry, would be more like Ezra Pound. There is a lot of information in most of my pictures, but not the kind of information you see in documentary photography. There is emotional information in my photographs.