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.

Southern poets are still writing narrative poems, poems in forms, dramatic poems.

I've always been intrigued with the male characters in novels like 'Pride and Prejudice' such as Mr. Darcy, and this poem is part of a series of poems that explore desire and obsessions. The poems have been sitting in a drawer for a few years, so I decided to dust them off and work on them again since I have not written a new poem in more than three years. I'm not sure anything will become of the series, but at least it gives me something to work on in a period where I feel very uncreative.

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 . . .

I believe it's impossible to write good poetry without reading. Reading poetry goes straight to my psyche and makes me want to write. I meet the muse in the poems of others and invite her to my poems. I see over and over again, in different ways, what is possible, how the perimeters of poetry are expanding and making way for new forms.

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.

Because so many poets have chosen a political idiom right now in the US and so many poets have assigned value and inherent knowledge to their racial identity and used that as a form of argumentation, I'm thinking now's a good time to buy low for my own poems and write poems that are deeply in the interior and the psyche. There are plenty of people out there working on subjects of political poetry, partisan poetry, all the way through to crossing the threshold of propaganda. I start thinking now's a good time for me to start writing about the myths of my own psyche.

In other words the pictures are in a kind of relationship with each other which is touching only at points rather than pictures being illustrations of poems or poems extrapolations of the pictures.

I'd rather call prose poems something else, for clarity - something like "poetic prose," prose that contains a quality of poetry, but not poems.

Some of my favorite poems are "confessional" poems written in the voices of aliens ("Southbound on the Freeway" by May Swenson" and "Report from the Surface" by Anthony McCann), sheep ("Snow Line" by John Berryman) or a yak ("The Only Yak in Batesville, Virginia" by Oni Buchanan).

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.

I wrote a number of poems about Kah Tai lagoon, when Safeway was building that huge, ugly store down there where I used to love to watch the birds nest. That political poem, or environmental poem, was unsuccessful because Safeway built there anyway. And yet the poem has something to say today, as it did then. And I speak here only of my own poems. The agenda for every poet has to be different because most of us write from direct human experience in the world.

I 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.

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.

When you think of things that influenced your life, Mother Goose influenced more people than almost any other thing, the rhythms of those poems. Everything after that was a bare imitation of some of those mysterious and materialistic poems.

Good poems ask us to have complex minds and hearts. Even simple-of-surface poems want that. Perhaps those are the ones that want it most of all, since that's where they do their work: in the unspoken complexities, understood off the page.

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.

Often I find that poems predict what I'm going to do later in my own writing, and often I find that poems predict my life. So I think poetry is the most intense expression of feeling that we have.

A certain amount of housekeeping also goes on in my poems. I wash doorknobs, do dishes, mop floors, patch carpets, cook.

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.

I have a little tiny Emily Dickinson so big that I carry in my pocket everywhere. And you just read three poems of Emily. She is so brave. She is so strong. She is such a sexy, passionate, little woman. I feel better.

The best poems take long journeys. I like poetry best that journeys--while remaining in the human scale--to the other world, which may be a place as easily overlooked as a bee's wing

One of the things about landays is that they thrive in a modern context. Early on I went to this incredible Pashtun novelist, Mustafa Salik, who is a bestselling novelist in Afghanistan and works for the BBC in Pashto. With the question of the sanctity of the poems in mind, I asked him, "Aren't you worried? They've been posted on Facebook and such." And he said, "Just the opposite. This is a folk form; they survive and thrive as people share them."

There are not enough poems in praise of bed.

I liked the kid who wrote me that he had to do a term paper on a modern poet and he was doing me because, though they say you have to read poems twice, he found he could handle mine in one try.

For my best poems were all written when I felt the worst. When I was happy, I didn't write anything.

I'm terrified of switching the computer on because there are so many poems

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.

Years ago I used to set my alarm for 4 am, so that I could wake up in the middle of a dream and move directly into writing. I guess my favorite poems contain a mixture of intuitive and analytical thought.

Like all my poems, 'Negotiations' has several sources. It deals with aging lovers and the often silent deals they make. Thinking about bargains made me think of The Little Mermaid and that made me remember something I had just read about the incredibly complex process by which tadpoles (actual little mermaids) are somehow able to reabsorb their tails and fashion their future frog legs.

I'd worked on a series of Chicken Soup for the Teenage Soul books called The Real Deal for HCI books, which featured essays and poems from teens.Finding the right authors for the series has been no easy feat, mostly because I'm looking for a perfect blend of a teen girl with an interesting story or hook, fantastic writing talent, and the confidence to commit to writing a 30,000+ word book in a matter of months. It's a huge commitment and I recognize that, so the fit has to be there from all these different angles.

Somewhere back a whiskey or so ago I wrote that thinking was a real thing in the world, just like anything else. I mean that very literally, materially. And it's true about poems, too.

The passages in which Milton has alluded to his own circumstances are perhaps read more frequently, and with more interest, than any other lines in his poems.

The trauma said, ‘Don’t write these poems. Nobody wants to hear you cry about the grief inside your bones.

I'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.

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.

Ye are better than all the ballads That ever were sung or said; For ye are living poems, And all the rest are dead.

Mrs. James, my fifth-grade teacher, introduced us to some of the great literature of African American culture. I won my first blue ribbon reciting the vernacular poems of Paul Lawrence Dunbar, in particular "Little Brown Baby."

Here are poems from a new generation of writers who honor the magnetic fields of the real; who feel and think with full and open-eyed passion; who focus heat as the magnifying glass focuses sun: until the paper catches. Read them.

Being deeply aware of fragility and ecstasy seems to me an essential part of being alive and living fully - and there's no way for me to separate this from my poems.

Some of my poems indicate that I am writing while living alone after a split with a woman, and I've had many splits with women. I need solitude more often when I'm not writing than when I am.

I 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.

A writer who has never explored words, who has never searched, seeded, sieved, sifted through his knowledge and memory...dictiona ries, thesaurus, poems, favorite paragraphs, to find the right word, is like someone owning a gold mine who has never mined it.

I never find words right away. Poems for me always begin with images and rhythms, shapes, feelings, forms, dances in the back of my mind.

Re: Robert Montgomery's Poems His writing bears the same relation to poetry which a Turkey carpet bears to a picture. There are colours in the Turkey carpet out of which a picture might be made. There are words in Mr. Montgomery's writing which, when disposed in certain orders and combinations,have made, and will make again, good poetry. But, as they now stand, they seem to be put together on principle in such a manner as to give no image of anything in the heavens above, or in the earth beneath, or in the waters under the earth.

Ordering is very important with essays, even if a reader doesn't read the essays or the poems in order through the book...