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What does it mean to be a used white wife, a mother, a tragic girl writing poems? Sandra Simonds gets into these messy words and then tears them apart. Sometimes with the words of others. And sometimes with poems made from scratch. They aren't all bad, these words. But they aren't all good either. And that is where Mother was a Tragic Girl gets its power. You will at moments be laughing but then you will also at moments just as much be crying. If Antigone was alive and decided to write some poems about the nuclear family, she would write them like Sandra Simonds. These are tough.
Juliana SpahrI wrote those poems for myself, as a way of being a soldier here in this country. I didn't know the poems would travel. I didn't go to Lebanon until two years ago, but people told me that many Arabs had memorized these poems and translated them into Arabic.
June JordanThe poem in Where Good Swimmers Drown are love poems. But love poems that defy the divisions between emotion and intellect, private and public, life and art, writer and reader. To read Elbe's poems is to discover not only what it means to be in love, but what it means to be alive.
Jesse Lee KerchevalAs for the differences between audio and the printed page, the sonic aspects of poetry are important to me. I read my poems aloud to myself as I'm composing them. And I enjoy reading to an audience. I think people get tone more easily when they hear a writer read her work. Some people have told me they hear more humor in my poems at a live reading than when they see them on the page. I think that may be a matter of pacing. On the other hand, I've listened to a lot of poetry readings and I know how much you can miss. If you stop to really register one line, you miss the next three or so.
Rae ArmantroutI 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.
Charles GhignaThe grotesque in my poems is the motion I use to put myself and the grotesque world together. So the miserable images I use in my poems are the same as the letters I send into the miserable world.
Kim HyesoonI know I'll keep writing poems. That's the constant. I don't know about novels. They're hard. It takes so much concentrated effort. When I'm writing a novel it's pretty much all I can do. I get bored. It takes months. Movies do the same thing. It's all-encompassing. It feels like I'm going to end up writing poems, short stories and screenplays.
Sherman AlexieI 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.
May SartonHe was all emotion all the time, constantly talking about his feelings and his profound love for her. He was minutes from getting his first period. He wrote poems too. It's my personal belief that if men are writing poems, they're making up for something else like a big hair back, or one ball. Not that one ball is a bad thing. Especially since I don't know any females who are dying to their their hands on a set of balls. The way I see it, the less balls, the better.
Chelsea HandlerI was writing poems as I was walking. I was able to take that restlessness, that nomadic distraction, and use that distraction in the world and turn that distraction into observations and then into poems.
Shirley Geok-lin LimMany people have said to me, "What a pity you had such a big family to raise." "Think of the novels and the short stories and the poems you never had time to write because of that." And I looked at my children and I said, "These are my poems, these are my stories."
Olga MastersToo many poets write poems which are only difficult on the surface, difficult because the dramatic situation is easily misunderstood. It's not difficult to write poems that are misunderstood. A drunk, a three-year-old-they are easily misunderstood. What is difficult is being clear and mysterious at the same time. The dramatic situation needs to be as clear in a poem as it is in a piece of good journalism. The why is part of the mystery, but the who, what, where, and when should all be understood.
Miller WilliamsS. E. Smith's I Live in a Hut has a deceptively simple title, considering that the brain in that hut contains galaxies-worth of invention: At night when your soldiers are praying ceaselessly for less rain and more underwear my soldiers make underwear out of rain. These poems seesaw between despair and delight but delight is winning the battle. Smith is a somersaulting tightrope walker of a poet and her poems will make you look at anything and everything with new eyes: For days I tried to rub the new freckle // off my hand until I realized what it was / and began to grant it its sovereignty.
Matthea HarveyAt 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.
Jane HirshfieldI believe in creative failing - to contine to write poems that fail and fail and fail until a day comes when you've got a thousand poems behind you and you're relaxed and you finally write a good poem.
Ray BradburyI 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.
Edward HirschI never intended to write poems, nor to be a photographer, nor to be a film-maker. I just took many, many pictures and I would put them in an album, and then some years later I decided to show them and suddenly I was called a photographer. Same thing with my poetry. They're notes that I'd written in a book and it may be considered poetry.
Abbas KiarostamiMy songs were influenced not so much by poetry on the page but by poetry being recited by the poets who recited poems with jazz bands.
Bob DylanAfter I'd produced about two dozen pen and ink drawings, one evening I decided that they needed poems to accompany them. I still have no idea where that notion came from, but it took me about two hours to produce verses for these creatures.
Jack PrelutskyI'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.
Story MusgraveYou ever hear guys with small cocks talk about sex? Can't talk about it enough. They even got poems. They'll say, 'It's not the motion of the ocean, it's the boat of the lotion.' I've even heard variants..., it's not the tree or the size, it's the axe that you wax.' It's a whole sub-genre of poetry now that's taught in many of our finer institutions.
Norm MacDonaldI am pretty interested in hybrid forms. I love graphic novels and I think there should be more graphic poems in the world.
Matthea HarveyHorace, when he wrote the Ars Poetica, recommended that poets keep their poems home for ten years; don't let them go, don't publish them until you have kept them around for ten years: by that time, they ought to stop moving on you; by that time, you ought to have them right.
Donald HallDaily meditation keeps me sane. I memorize prayers or poems that express my highest spiritual ideals, and quietly, word for word, go through the prayer first thing in the morning. Julian of Norwich or St. Francis or the compassionate Buddha. It's called passage meditation. You internalize the perennial philosophies.
Ashley JuddIn 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. Riveraโs work is rich in empathy and invention. Heathen is a book of psalms for the present day.
Terrance HayesA poem, being an instance of language, hence essentially dialogue, may be a letter in a bottle thrown out to the sea with the-surely not always strong-hope that it may somehow wash up somewhere, perhaps on the shoreline of the heart. In this way, too, poems are en route: they are headed towards. Toward what? Toward something open, inhabitable, an approachable you, perhaps, an approachable reality. Such realities are, I think, at stake in a poem.
Paul CelanI held her wrists and then I got it through the eyes: hatred, centuries deep and true. I was wrong and graceless and sick. all the things I had learned had been wasted. there was no creature living as foul as I and all my poems were false.
Charles BukowskiI don't know if we ever have enough distance to "see" our own trajectory. We're in the muddled middle of it. Who knows what will last, what poems will take hold of the imaginations of the future.
Dorianne LauxI'd try to write my poems in a certain rhythm. I had my rock 'n' roll stuff for performing and my denser stuff for writing.
Patti Smithneither 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.
Tadeusz BorowskiSeek wisdom in books, rare manuscripts, and cryptic poems if you will, but seek it out also in simple stones, and fragile herbs, and in the cries of wild birds. Listen to the whisperings of the wind and the roar of water if you would discover magic, for it is here that the old secrets are preserved.
Scott CunninghamI just think that the world of workshops - I've written a poem that is a parody of workshop talk, I've written a poem that is a kind of parody of a garrulous poet at a poetry reading who spends an inordinate amount of time explaining the poem before reading it, I've written a number of satirical poems about other poets.
Billy CollinsWe recognize that we cannot survive on meditation, poems and sunsets. We are restless. We have an irresistible urge to dip our hands into the stuff of the earth and do something with it.
Samuel FlormanI've learned that my readings of others' work often has little connection to their intentions. This doesn't mean that my response is wrong, and it doesn't make the author's views less right. Poets, like their poems, are "hopeful monsters".
Alice FultonDark pictures, thrones, the stones that pilgrims kiss Poems that take a thousand years to die But ape the immortality of this Red label on a little butterfly .
Vladimir NabokovVirtually every beginning poet hurts himself by an addiction to adjectives. Verbs are by far the most important things for poems-especially wonderful tough monosyllables like "gasp" and "cry." Nouns are the next most important. Adjectives tend to be useless.
Donald HallOrdering is very important with essays, even if a reader doesn't read the essays or the poems in order through the book...
Pattiann RogersI 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.
Dorianne LauxI think I've been writing black poems all along, wearing my white mask. I'm always the victim ... but no longer!
Anne SextonI see the progress typical in some of my poems as starting with something simple and moving into something more demanding. This is certainly the pattern of weird poetry.
Billy CollinsIf you have no love, do what you will - go after all the gods on earth, do all the social activities, try to reform the poor, the politics, write books, write poems - you are a dead human being. Without love your problems will increase, multiply endlessly.
Jiddu KrishnamurtiEvery poet gets to choose what kind of community he or she serves with the poems, and it's true that there is a community for very difficult, challenging poetry. It's a community that's established itself over the last 80 years, that was originally, in effect, really started by T. S. Eliot and Ezra Pound. They believed that poetry ought to contain learning, that it ought to rise upon all the learning that went before.
Ted Kooser