Popular quotes about Poems! Wisdom and inspiration are here! | page 66
I wrote the poems in Charms Against Lightning one by one, over almost a decade, and I did not write them toward any theme or narrative. But once I really got serious about putting together a book, I began to see that in fact there were themes across the poems, if only because my own obsessions had brought me back time and again to the same ground. I realized that any ordering of the poems would determine how those themes developed over the manuscript, and how the collection's dramatic conflicts were resolved.
James ArthurThere 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.
Kevin PowersPeople have explored these questions ['Why am I here?', 'What is life about?'] in poems, not that they found their answers, but in reading [poems], I think, you find a certain beauty in the questioning, and that is then poetry.
Gwee Li SuiIf you were going to make sculptures of them, the swivel poems would be disparate objects all attached with hinges and the prose poems would be small sheep wrapped in extra wool.
Matthea HarveyI also like poems that are haunted by a structure or a narrative, or poems that frisk flirtatiously at the boundary of sense.
Matthea HarveyPoems have ideas. The ideas of poems come out of their emotions and their emotions are carried on images.
E. L. DoctorowThe judges who awarded the 1980 Commonwealth Poetry Prize to my first collection of poems, Crossing the Peninsula and Other Poems, cited with approval and with no apparent conscious irony my early poem, "No Alarms." The poem was composed probably sometime in 1974 or 1975, and it complained about the impossibility of writing poetry - of being a poet - under the conditions in which I was living then.
Shirley Geok-lin LimI'd rather call prose poems something else, for clarity - something like "poetic prose," prose that contains a quality of poetry, but not poems.
Pattiann RogersI see no reason to spend your life writing poems unless your goal is to write great poems.
Donald HallThe poems in Helena Mesaโs virtuosic first book, Horse Dance Underwater, run with such speed, verve, and alacrity they leave you breathless, exhilarated, and transformed as if the purest kind of song had lifted you into the air. By this quickness of language finding lyric speech, Mesaโs poems remind us of artโs joyous and ecstatic effects.
Michael CollierI wrote two poems about the 81 uprisings: Di Great Insohreckshan and Mekin Histri. I wrote those two poems from the perspective of those who had taken part in the Brixton riots. The tone of the poem is celebratory because I wanted to capture the mood of exhilaration felt by black people at the time.
Linton Kwesi JohnsonI 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 KiarostamiIf 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.
Ray BradburyI 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 poems I did write there [in Harvard] include Alphabets the 1984 Phi Beta Kappa poem and A Sofa in the Forties. And, of course, the John Harvard poem for the 350th anniversary Villanelle for an Anniversary.
Seamus HeaneyI'm partial to coffee shops, brain work, and poems on the page. I write after midnight. Sometimes, twisty syntax happens, and I surrender.
Marvin BellMy face responds without authorization from my brain, so the resulting smile feels like the biggest, most unguarded, goofiest smile Iโve ever unleashed in my entire life. I didnโt even know my face could do this. Itโs like there were hidden zippers in my cheeks. Jesus. This must be what feelings are. This is why people write poems! I get it now. I get it, and I want more.
Laini TaylorI try to hold both history and wilderness in mind, that my poems may the true measure of things and stand against the unbalance and ignorance of our times.
Gary SnyderI 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.
May SartonGood acts are like good poems. One may easily get their drift, but they are not rationally understood.
Albert EinsteinIn White Summer, Joelle Biele exhibits a Roethke-like affinity with nature and natures creatures. At times a miniaturist, Biele constructs exquisite addresses to a heron, cicada, spider, catalpa tree, mockingbird, snail, cormorant, and others. These pitch-perfect poems are written with a delicate, meticulous attention to craft and music. Like the joy she takes in her subjects, this collection is a joy to read.
Elizabeth SpiresCarol Guess's poems are sexy, intuitive, angry, and hopeful. These lyrical narratives measure the impossibly small distance between love and fear. They are a reminder that we're all vulnerable little vessels filled by the people who can break us.
Zachary SchomburgI co-edited an anthology called Interfictions with Delia Sherman and wrote a short scholarly book on three women poets called Voices from Fairyland: The Fantastical Poems of Mary Coleridge, Charlotte Mew, and Sylvia Townsend Warner. So I've been busy, but I haven't had time to write a novel.
Theodora GossGabriel Levin's book is a journey through time and through entrenched animosities of the Middle East. What's astonishing and refreshing is his ability to combine the reporter's perspective with a deep knowledge of poetry, including pre-Islamic Arab poems. A brilliant poet is at work here-a poet in the rugged landscape of conflict and pain.
Adam ZagajewskiI 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 GallowayI don't let a poem go into the world unless I feel that I've transformed the experience in some way. Even poems I've written in the past that appear very personal often are fictions of the personal, which nevertheless reveal concerns of mine. I've always thought of my first-person speaker as an amalgam of selves, maybe of other people's experiences as well.
Stephen DunnIn my godless household, poems were the closest we came to sacred speech -- the only prayers said.
Mary KarrThe writing of an assay-type poem or a poem investigating perspective isn't an exercise of rational or strategic mind. Poems for me are acts of small or large desperation. They grapple with surfaces too steep to walk in any other way, yet which have to be traveled.
Jane HirshfieldIf 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 KrishnamurtiI like to go back and read poems that I wrote fifty years ago, twenty years ago, and sometimes they surprise me - I didn't know I knew that then. Or maybe I didn't know it then, and I know more now.
Maya AngelouI suppose every one must have reflected how primeval and how poetical are the things that one carries in one's pocket; the pocket-knife, for instance, the type of all human tools, the infant of the sword. Once I planned to write a book of poems entirely about things in my pockets. But I found it would be too long; and the age of the great epics is past.
Gilbert K. ChestertonI see a vision of a great rucksack revolution thousands or even millions of young Americans wandering around with rucksacks, going up to mountains to pray, making children laugh and old men glad, making young girls happy and old girls happier, all of 'em Zen Lunatics who go about writing poems that happen to appear in their heads for no reason and also by being kind and also by strange unexpected acts keep giving visions of eternal freedom to everybody and to all living creatures.
Gary SnyderI invented animals and birds - I had about two dozen. After working on them for six months, I sat down and just for fun wrote two dozen poems to accompany the drawings. It was for no one to every see, but a friend sent me in to an editor.
Jack PrelutskyShe could become a spinster, like Emily Dickinson, writing poems full of dashes and brilliance, and never gaining weight.
Jeffrey EugenidesWilliam Carlos Williams, late in his long life, had a dream: He saw an enormous spiral staircase in empty space, and his father slowly descending toward him. When he reached the bottom, his father walked over, looked him in the eye and said: โYou know those poems you're writing? They're no good.โ
Eliot WeinbergerLenelle Moรฏse's poems render the abstract - policy, disaster, history, diaspora - specific. Her words make the political not just personal, but corporeal: the beautiful system of the human body as canvas and subject, perfect in all its attendant complications and complexity, and still ruled, undeniably, by a warm, beating heart.
Erin McKeownOne attraction of Latin is that you can immerse yourself in the poems of Horace and Catullus without fretting over how to say, "Have a nice day."
Peter BrodieIf the poem is so moving that even if you have no experience in that particular setting be it 1920's Harlem let's say. You still are so moved that you can put yourself in that position. That means that the writer has managed to go beyond the personal and touch the humanity in all of us and it's really a blast to read it because I realize how that this does hold true for the truly great poems.
Rita DoveMy verses, I cannot say poems. . . . I was following in the exquisite footsteps of Miss Millay, unhappily in my own horrible sneakers.
Dorothy Parker