Quotes About Poems

My obsessions tend to cluster, so I often have families of poems in which only a couple of them make it to the book. It can be satisfying to banish poems to my "crappy poems" file.

Lizzie Harris's Stop Wanting is an unflinching book about a girlhood filled with violence, doubt, vulnerability, and loss. These gorgeously crafted and hauntingly memorable poems are a bleak place full of life, prayer, and the kind of answers only poems like these can provide.

[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.

With time some poems just fall by the wayside. Other poems get better over time with revision, revision, revision. My ladybug poem took 10 minutes to write but was 10 years in the making.

I love to read long books. I enjoy experiencing that extension. But it's not something I feel comfortable with and not something I think I can gain comfort with by practice. It was a real struggle for me while writing memoir to get past three pages or so. In poems, I can write long poems. But length in prose: no.

I write poems about relationships, love relationships, and I'm not able to do that all the time. I could go two years without writing poems, and then write a dozen. Having a novel to work on, with the intricate puzzle of character and plot to work out, is satisfying for the time there is no poetry.

My dad, a mathematician, raised me to believe that mathematics is beautiful, so math is a part of my imaginative terrain. In my late 20s I wrote several 11-line poems because I wanted to create poems that couldn't be uniformly divided into couplets, tercets, or quatrains, 11 being a prime number.

During the Gulf War, I remember two little third grade girls saying to me - after I read them some poems by writers in Iraq - 'You know, we never thought about there being children in Iraq before.' And I thought, 'Well those poems did their job, because now they'll think about everything a little bit differently.'

I've always believed that poetry must speak of realities as least as complicated as those spoken of in prose. I've read books of poems, even single poems, which are, for me, at least the equivalent of a short story or a novel. Martin Amis, in an interview with Saul Bellow in the early eighties, quotes Bellow asking, "Why not address 'the mysterious circumstance of being', say what it's like to be alive at this time, on this planet?" This has been and still is my ambition.

Writing for me is an ongoing practice of facing and countering fears. And so, in that sense, I have always been responding to phobias. I am often most surprised by the writing that comes from facing fears that strike closest to home, poems that explore internalized phobias about gender identity, sexuality, and the body, poems that struggle with a question like do I deserve love?

What if this young woman, who writes such bad poems, in competition with her husband, whose poems are equally bad, should stretch her remarkably long and well-made legs out before you, so that her skirt slips up to the tops of her stockings?

At another level, though, poems can craft an eraser - we can't revise the past, but poems allow us some malleability, an increased freedom of response, comprehension, feeling. Choice, what choices are possible for any given person, is another theme that's run through my work from the start.

Hyesims poems: transformative as walking high granite mountains by moonlight, with fragrant herbs underfoot and a thermos of clear tea in the backpack. Their bedrock is thusness, their images beauty is pellucid and new, their view without limit. The shelf of essential Zen poets for American readers grows larger with this immediately indispensable collection.

If you stuff yourself full of poems, essays, plays, stories, novels, films, comic strips, magazines, music, you automatically explode every morning like Old Faithful. I have never had a dry spell in my life, mainly because I feed myself well, to the point of bursting. I wake early and hear my morning voices leaping around in my head like jumping beans. I get out of bed to trap them before they escape.

In the power and splendor of the universe, inspiration waits for the millions to come. Man has only to strive for it. Poems greater than the Iliad, plays greater than Macbeth, stories more engaging than Don Quixote await their seeker and finder.

I am preparing myself for death. When I go to sleep, I try to keep myself smiling. So that when I die, I have a smile on my lips. I want an electric cremation. I don't want any poems or fuss after that. And for heaven's sake, don't bring back my ashes. Flush them down the toilet if the crematorium refuses to keep them. If they tell you that I am dead, I want you to give a big laugh.

I'm filled with admiration, delight, and gratitude at discovering James Lasdun's poems in A Jump Start. He has wit, speed, intelligence, a keen eye, precision, and imagination of a high order.

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.

Once I planned to write a book of poems entirely about the things in my pocket. But I found it would be too long; and the age of the great epics is past.

Mythologies, in other words, mythologies and religions are great poems and, when recognized as such, point infallibly through things and events to the ubiquity of a

A lot of young poets today, from what I've heard and experienced, can't get their heads past George W. Bush, and I've heard so many poems about this democracy and this era of politics that I'm kind of bored by it

It snowed right before Jack stopped talking to Hazel, fluffy white flakes big enough to show their crystal architecture, like perfect geometric poems.

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.

I've been an inveterate reader of literary magazines since I was a teenager. There are always discoveries. You're sitting in your easy chair, reading; you realize you've read a story or a group of poems four times, and you know, Yes, I want to go farther with this writer.

I require silence to write the way an apple tree requires winter to make fruit. Being with people is intimate and joyous, but at some point, I'll wander off by myself. The paradox is that what began in childhood as an act of necessary solitude has led me straight to a life with others, in which I fly to China or Lithuania or northern Minnesota to read my poems and talk with other people who love language made into a lathe on which a life can be tuned and be turned.

Poems give you the lives of others and then circle in on your own inner world.

If art doesn't require an audience, can an intimate conversation be a work of art? Can a thought be a work of art? Maybe. I don't know. These questions are completely hypothetical for me, because I love interacting with audiences. I want my poems to be heard.

Always learn poems by heart. They have to become the marrow in your bones. Like fluoride in the water, they'll make your soul impervious to the world's soft decay.

And Robert Lowell, of course - in his poems, we're not located in his actual life. We're located more in the externals, in the journalistic facts of his life.

The poems are part of my attempt to understand being in the world in an honest way.

There are poems about the internet and about the shipping forecast but very few by women celebrating men.

Don't write poems to make girls like you, because it will not make them like you but it will give them something to quote back at you later in life.

You must understand the whole of life, not just one little part of it. That is why you must read, that is why you must look at the skies, that is why you must sing and dance, and write poems and suffer and understand, for all that is life.

My colleagues knew I was writing poems. I never hid it from them. I don't think they ever thought I was cheating on them. So, I think they probably saw it as being rather peculiar, that I was doing that sort of thing, but nobody ever suggested I shouldn't be doing it. I think that would be different on Madison Avenue or Wall Street, where you're really expected to be doing 110 percent for the company.

The poets, therefore, however much they adorned the gods in their poems, and amplified their exploits with the highest praises, yet very frequently confess that all things are held together and governed by one spirit or mind.

Creativity is essential to any kind of joyful living. Sometimes I act, sometimes I draw, I paint, I write poems. I can't imagine living without it.

I think what life experience has brought to my poems is compassion. When you work hard to make a living, raise a child up into the world, fail at marriage and try again, teach and fail, travel and fall, become ill, well again, weak but grateful, you learn patience, forbearance.

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.

I think I've been writing black poems all along, wearing my white mask. I'm always the victim ... but no longer!

I don't know why Sinclair Lewis fell in love with me. He didn't get even the slightest response from me. But his letters were lovely. And the poems he wrote me were lovely. I used some of them in my book.

I like ornament at the right time, but I don't want a poem to be made out of decoration ... When I read the poems that matter to me, it stuns me how much the presence of the heart-in all its forms-is endlessly available there. To experience ourselves in an important way just knocks me out. It puzzles me why people have given that up for cleverness. Some of them are ingenious, more ingenious than I am, but so many of them aren't any good at being alive.

My poems - I don't even like the sound of that, in a way. Not that anyone else wrote them. But we know that only people who are really close to us care about our personal experience.

I have seen too many men wilt and go silly under a little light, and then they continue to write and get published, turning out pure crap under a name that has become a bad habit. The next poem is all that counts. You can't stand on past poems.

There were a hundred booksellers in the old round city founded by the eighth-century caliph al-Mansur. The café and wine-drinking culture of Baghdad has been famous for centuries; there was a whole school of Iraqi poets who wrote poems about the wine bars of medieval Baghdad - the khamriyaat, or wine songs, that I quote in the book.

There's two kinds of women--those you write poems about and those you don't.

We want to be famous as a writer, as a poet, as a painter, as a politician, as a singer, or what you will. Why? Becauwse we really don't lov what we are doing. If you loved to sing, or to paint, or to write poems - if you really loved it - you would not be concerned with whether you are famous or not. ... Our present education is rotten because it teaches us to love Nothing is allowed to die in a society of storytelling people.

My readers at that time were still men of letters; but there had to be other people waiting to read my poems.

Even when there's not a joke or a hook, the first line has to be good and snapem to attention. Songs ain't novels. You don't have 30 pages to slowly wrap somebody in. They're more like short stories or poems. If the first line hasn't grabbed them, you won't get to the second line. Once you've developed an audience, you may have some luxury and trust, so you don't have to knock 'em over the head with line one.