Popular quotes about Poems! Wisdom and inspiration are here! | page 59
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.
Anna JourneyPoems don't have to rhyme... Poems are about beauty and emotion; in other words poems are about feelings.
Nikki GiovanniI 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 GhignaMy 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.
Lawrence JosephAs a guiding principle I believe that every poem must be its own sole freshly created universe, and therefore have no belief n 'tradition' or a common myth-kitty or casual allusions in poems to other poems or poets, which last I find unpleasantly like the talk of literary understrappers letting you see they know the right people.
Philip LarkinWith 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.
Douglas FlorianYou've read some of the poems in this new unpublished book [Walker's Alphabet], e.g., the poem "C." I have a number of poems whose titles are letters of the alphabet:โA, B, C, D, E, F.
Shirley Geok-lin LimWith ferocity and extraordinary craft, Lizzie Harris has made a book of poems that resonates far beyond the personal stories it tells. Stop Wanting reveals, in every lyric, its author's profound metaphorical gifts. In its ironies and intensities, it brings to mind a writer like the young Sylvia Plath, though what is startling about Harris' s work is the way it combines those gifts with a muted, deft self-awareness. Most of all, these are wonderfully shaped, powerful, and surprising poems-a startling debut.
Meghan O'RourkeI 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 LimI was walking every morning, and I'd take my iPod and paper and pen.โAs I walked, I wrote a poem, and then I'd come home - and sometimes it's legible, sometimes not - I typed the poem up. So I have a new, yet to be published, collection of poems now. It's called Walker's Alphabet, and among other things, it is about walking. My most recent collection of poems in 2010, incidentally, was titled WALKING backwards.
Shirley Geok-lin LimPoem for Liu Ya-tzu I cannot forget how in Canton we drank tea and in Chungking went over our poems when leaves were yellowing. Thirty-one years ago and now we come back at last to the ancient capital Peking. In this season of falling flowers I read your beautiful poems. Be careful not to be torn inside. Open your vision to the world. Don't say that waters of Kumming Lake are too shallow. We can watch fish better here than in the Fuchun River in the south.
Mao ZedongPoems are language turned into art; sound and sense matter; they can be as long or longer than The Odyssey or as short or shorter than a haiku. Not very helpful.
Campbell McGrathI wanted a perfect ending. Now I've learned, the hard way, that some poems don't rhyme, and some stories don't have a clear beginning, middle and end.
Gilda RadnerI definitely notice the absence of character in most poetry, which is not so say that I'm an innovator in that regard. Character-based poems are not weird or new by any stretch but they feel strange and new because the atmosphere is one in which no one does that. People always talk about, and with good reason, poetry's unpopularity. When people say that they forget or they brush aside the fact that in the middle part of the last century poetry was immensely popular. Dylan Thomas was basically a rock star; so was Anne Sexton.
Shane McCraeThe "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.
Denise DuhamelWriting poems is my way of celebrating with the world that I have not committed suicide the evening before.
Alice WalkerWell, 'The Wellspring' was written from 1983 to 1986. And it had a section in the beginning that was poems that began from others' experience.
Sharon OldsAs artists, we belong to an ancient and holy tribe. We are the carriers of the truth that spirit moves through us all. When we deal with one another, we are dealing not merely with our own human personalities but also with the unseen but ever-present throng of ideas, visions, stories, poems, songs, sculptures, art-as-facts that crowd the temple of consciousness waiting their turn to be born.
Julia CameronI've said what I'm prepared to say in my poems, and then journalists think that you're going to tell them a whole lot more.
Wendy CopeIf you must write prose or poems, the words you use should be your own. Don't plagiarize or take 'on loan'. There's always someone, somewhere, with a big nose, who knows, who'll trip you up and laugh when you fall.
Steven MorrisseyA painter can turn pennies into gold, for all subjects are capable of being transformed into poems.
Jean-Auguste-Dominique IngresEverybody is different. Some comedy is more musical like Steven Wright. His is a pillar of comedy to me. He invented a whole form and all his jokes are poems. So it's different. I wanted to do it like George Carlin. Now I do it like me.
Louis C. K.Today is the first of August. It is hot, steamy and wet. It is raining. I am tempted to write a poem. But I remember what it said on one rejection slip: 'After a heavy rainfall, poems titled 'Rain' pour in from across the nation.
Sylvia PlathI 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 SmithOne 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 MatejkaAlways 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.
Janet FitchParaphrase, in the sense of summary, is as indispensable to the novel-critic as close analysis is to the critic of lyric poetry. The natural deduction is that novels are paraphrasable whereas poems are not. But this is a false deduction because close analysis is itself a disguised form of paraphrase.
David LodgeBesides the actual reading in class of many poems, I would suggest you do two things: first, while teaching everything you can and keeping free of it, teach that poetry is a mode of discourse that differs from logical exposition
A. R. AmmonsI already read everything. I read poems and plays and novels and newspapers and comic books and magazines. I read tins in supermarkets and leaflets that come through the door, unsolicited mail. None of it lasts long and it doesn't give me answers. Reading too fast is not soothing.
Janice GallowayAlmost anything is too much. I am trying in my poems to have the reader be the experiencer. I do not want to be there. It is not even a walk we take together.
Mary OliverCreativity 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.
Zephyr TeachoutIโm not a woman you bring home to Mother, pick out china patterns with, or Mary forefend, breed. Iโve seen a chunk of the universe, true, but thereโs still so much more to see. I doubt Iโll ever cure this wanderlust, and Iโm content with dedicating my life to failing to sate it... Heโs never going to sit at my feet and write me poems, which is good because I hate poetry, except dirty ones that rhyme.
Ann AguirreRemember the plants, trees, animal life who all have their families, their histories too. Talk to them, listen to them. They are alive poems.
Joy HarjoPoems offer us counter-knowledges. They let us see what is invisible to ordinary looking, and to find in overlooked corners the opulence of our actual lives. Similarly, we usually spend our waking hours trying to be sure of things - of our decisions, our ideas, our choices. We so want to be right. But we walk by right foot and left foot.
Jane HirshfieldMy poems and prose are not often in direct conversation with each other, but there's so much crossover - everything that comes out of that crucible of language - that working in poetry and prose is energizing - to me as a writer and to the work itself.
Alex LemonEven 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.
Dan BernWhen I was home, traditionally since I was young, I'd write in cafรฉs. That was the romantic notion in 1963. Cafรฉ atmospheres back then were different. The cafรฉ life really stemmed from the Parisians' idea of it, with poets struggling over their poems and drinking coffee. No music, no sounds, maybe a little jazz, or soul, but mostly nothing. Now you go into a cafรฉ and the music is really loud, people are having business meetings, they are on their cellphones. It changes from generation to generation.
Patti SmithAnd when my second book had come out, "Wild Gratitude," I went to Pearl London's class and she worked through different drafts of poems and there were the drafts of my poem, "Wild Gratitude," and I saw that I had begun the poem with the title "August 13th."
Edward Hirsch