Quotes About Poems

It's true, there aren't many explicit references to Canada in my book. And not many explicit references to the U.S., either. I try to fill my poems with enough real, observed detail that the poems create a believable world - but I don't write poems for the sake of telling my own story. My life is not important or interesting enough to warrant that kind of documentary. Instead I try to use my experience as a way of understanding situations that are common to many people. I want readers to project their own lives onto my poems.

There are definitely connections between poems, but I wanted each to stand on its own. I guess it goes back to the idea of trying to zoom in and out, and to modulate, so there are different ways of looking at any experience for the reader. Even having short poems and long poems - there has to be some kind of variation in the experience of reading as a whole.

In my own writing, I've mostly abandoned end-rhyme, but wordplay is still a huge part of my process. I've written a series of mermaid poems in the last few years. The first one was called "The Straightforward Mermaid" which arose from my delight in that word combination. After that, I decided that future mermaid poems would have to be words ending in "d" or "t," which led to "The Deadbeat Mermaid," "The Morbid Mermaid" and so forth . . .

Narrative nonfiction was not my forte. I always wanted to let my imagination run free, and the facts sometimes got in the way. At one point I wanted to illustrate Jack Prelutsky's enchanting poems. Unable to do that, I started devising and improvising my own poems, very raw at first. I immersed myself in verse, writing reams of stuff until it gelled.

[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.

I write poems for children to help them celebrate the joy and wonder of their world and to look at their lives from the inside out. I write humorous poems to tickle the funny bone of their imaginations.

I guess that would have been 1968. I was a freshman in college and I wasn't writing good poems, but I was at least trying to write poems then.

My sense of the poet is classical - the poet is one who makes poems. In each book, I develop and repeat certain general themes - time, place, memory, God, history, class, race, beauty, love, poetry, identity. The core identity is the poet making the poems.

Emily Kendal Frey's The Grief Performance is a book that condenses a journey of finding and re-finding loss into beautiful packages. The packages are the poems and they sit shiny and new on every page of this fabulous and generous book. I want to go into the world that these poems create, just so that I can be given these terrifying presents again and again. I know you will, too. See you there.

As a university student, I tried hard to write poems in Korean. It was at that time that I foresaw my death and the world's death. I think my poems started at that time.

I wanted many of the poems to have long legs. At first I was calling them clothespin poems, before I knew what I was doing. The lines seem pulled on either end, tight and taut against the wind.

So what rhyming poems do is they take all these nearby sound curves and remind you that they first existed that way in your brain. Before they meant something specific, they had a shape and a way of being said. And now, yes, gloom and broom are floating fifty miles away from each other in you mind because they refer to different notions, but they're cheek-by-jowl as far as your tongue is concerned. And that's what a poem does. Poems match sounds up the way you matched them when you were a tiny kid, using that detachable front phoneme.

The most exhilarating for the writer and the reader, are gift-things-poems which arrive on their own energy, poems that in William Shakespeare's term "slip" from you.

The day after the president Trump election, I remember feeling like it was 1984 again. It was in the air somehow. That ownership of bigotry. I hadn't seen it since I was a kid. It made me want to change the kinds of poems I was writing, but I'm terrible at writing overtly political poems.

I started then to try and shape something rather than just express it and when I started to shape something and to imitate other poems that were written by other people, when I had tried to integrate my reading and my writing I was on my path.

Eight years ago, I was drawn into Keats's world by Andrew Motion's biography. Soon I was reading back and forth between Keats's letters and his poems. The letters were fresh, intimate and irreverent, as though he were present and speaking. The Keats spell went very deep for me.

Keats, it must be remembered, was a sensualist. His poems ... reveal him as a man not altogether free from the vulgarities of sensualism, as well as one who was able to transmute it into perfect literature.

The "biggest" poems I ever made are based on the psychological principal of the "Johari Window:" what the self freely shares with others; what the self hides from others; what others hide from the self; and what is unknown to the self and others.

There are real facts in my poems, but facts mixed up in the perverse stubborn stew of imagination, add a pinch or two of revenge and retribution, a dash of amplification and reparation.

I've already written 300 space poems. But I look upon my ultimate form as being a poetic prose. When you read it, it appears to be prose, but within the prose you have embedded the techniques of poetry.

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.

A number of poems don't work alone. They need to fit together to work.

I loved them all the way one loves at any age -- if it's real at all -- obsessively, painfully, with wild exultation, with guilt, with conflict; I wrote poems to and about them, I put them into novels (disguised of course); I brooded upon why they were as they were, so often maddening don't you know? I wrote them ridiculous letters. I lived with their faces. I knew their every gesture by heart. I stalked them like wild animals. I studied them as if they were maps of the world -- and in a way I suppose they were.

In HEATHEN, R. Flowers Rivera remixes the classical and the Biblical, the usual and the typical until what we thought we knew of ourselves and others is new again. The mythic becomes particular; the particular becomes mythic in these fascinating poems of personalities and personas. Rivera’s work is rich in empathy and invention. Heathen is a book of psalms for the present day.

I don't think I'd ever get any better as a poet if I didn't push myself, very deliberately, to grow. My best poems surprise me, as they should, but I fight them at every turn, possibly just because I'm stubborn.

My advice to aspiring poets is to find a community of other poets who are willing to read one another's work. And to read widely, in a variety of time periods and cultures, to identify which traits of poems are appealing and which aversive. And what can be stolen.

neither poems nor prose just a length of rope just the wet earth -- that's the way home. neither vodka nor bread just bursts of rage just more new graves -- that's youth and that's love. neither sleep nor waking neither joy nor laughter just tears in the night -- so the rope, paper, knife.

I think it is our job as poets to refuse the terms that society so often sets for usefulness. That, for instance, is what Dickinson did: she refused to be a wife, a homemaker, a standard member of her community. She knew she had to in order to have the space and time to write her poems. Thank god she said no!

I used to hide my real emotions in gobbledegook, like in In His Own Write. When I wrote teenage poems, I wrote in gobbledegook because I was always hiding my real emotions from Mimi.

That was one of things that surprised me so much when I was writing the poems. The contrasts between the haves and have-nots is so complicated. It's financial of course, but it's also the lifestyle choices. The more money people have the further away from each other they often want to be. So while I loved not being hungry and having new gear, etc. I missed the sounds of my neighbors and the kind of generosity people who are struggling together often show.

I think, though, that perspective-awareness may follow from a kind of speaking that also came into my work more recently - the "assay" poems (some labeled that, some not) that engage an abstraction or object from multiple angles.

No, I don't know any Emily Dickinson poems!

Remember the plants, trees, animal life who all have their families, their histories too. Talk to them, listen to them. They are alive poems.

When fiction writers like my poems I feel like I've hit the jackpot.

My poems are more my silence than my speech. Just as music is a kind of quiet. Sounds are needed only to unveil the various layers of silence.

Women are not supposed to have uteruses, especially in poems.

I like having a phrase lying around to get poems started. It's like having a key.

Actually, my first literary heroes were the Romantic poets, so I began to get serious by writing poems. I have notebooks full of them that I cherish but am afraid to look at.

I don't like poems that invent memories, I have enough of my own.

My poems often start with an idea, some kind of inspiration. I don't expect anything. Every now and then something like "The One Truth" comes out.

I don't want my poems to be sentimental, though I do acknowledge that sentiment is probably rather under-reported in a lot of people's feelings a lot of the time.

...few young poets [are] testing their poems against the ear. They're writing for the page, and the page, let me tell you, is a cold bed.

It would be worth the while to select our reading, for books are the society we keep; to read only the serenely true; never statistics, nor fiction, nor news, nor reports, nor periodicals, but only great poems, and when they failed, read them again, or perchance write more. Instead of other sacrifice, we might offer up our perfect (teleia) thoughts to the gods daily, in hymns or psalms. For we should be at the helm at least once a day.

I don't write poems with a purpose in mind, but I'd hope that some readers would find their experiences mirrored or articulated here - and that the language would feel alive to them. Alive, in a way that is meaningful and pleasurable.

When poems are no good they don't make any sense.

By being fictions and, at the same moment, returning their subjects to us with a compelling fidelity, both photographs and poems work with the same surprise... both strike us as if they were simultaneously remembrances and revelations.

Poets do not compose their poems with knowledge, but by some inborn talent and by inspiration, like seers and prophets who also say many fine things without any understanding of what they say.

However gross a man may be, the minute he expresses a strong and genuine affection, some inner secretion alters his features, animates his gestures, and colors his voice. The stupidest man will often, under the stress of passion, achieve heights of eloquence, in thought if not in language, and seem to move in some luminous sphere. Goriot's voice and gesture had at this moment the power of communication that characterizes the great actor. Are not our finer feelings the poems of the human will?