Popular quotes about Poems! Wisdom and inspiration are here! | page 66
I know that one of the things that I really did to push myself was to write more formal poems, so I could feel like I was more of a master of language than I had been before. That was challenging and gratifying in so many ways. Then with these new poems, I've gone back to free verse, because it would be easy to paint myself into a corner with form. I saw myself becoming more opaque with the formal poems than I wanted to be. It took me a long time to work back into free verse again. That was a challenge in itself. You're always having to push yourself.
Barbara HambyMy 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 JourneyMy days are filled with work I love - reading poems, writing poems, talking with people about poems, teaching, directing a writing program, hosting readings, etc.
Deborah LandauThese are crystalline - oftentimes incandescent - translations of Juarroz's powerful metaphysical poems where eternity and silence jut up against a world where โwriting infects the landscapeโ and there are โmore letters than leavesโ - The kind of match one hopes for where both the translator and the poet are in luck; new poems which don't leak and yet old poems in which the original passion shines.
Jorie GrahamI want to write songs with complete sentences. I almos have this obsession with short-changing words. I would never be so pretentious to say that my lyrics are poetry. ... Poems are poems. Song lyrics are for songs.
Ben GibbardI 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 GhignaBecause 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.
David BiespielWith 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'RourkeDuring 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.'
Naomi Shihab NyeBut give thanks, at least, that you still have Frost's poems; and when you feel the need of solitude, retreat to the companionship of moon, water, hills and trees. Retreat, he reminds us, should not be confused with escape. And take these poems along for good luck!
Robert GravesAnna Journey, in her new book of poems, Vulgar Remedies, creates an alchemical self whose shimmering limbic / alembic lyrics distill the mysterious terrors of childhood, the dangerous passions of adults, into her own honey-dusk 'voodun': protective, purified to gold. Poetry is always a time machine: here we are invisible travelers to a bewitched past, a beautifully occluded future. These poems are erotic, vertiginous, revelatory, their dazzling lyric force reflecting profound hermetic life.
Carol Muske-DukesA poetess who had died young of cancer had said in one of her poems that for her, on sleepless nights, 'the night offers toads and black dogs and corpses of the drowned.
Yasunari KawabataPoems 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 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.
Maurice SendakWhen I was a young girl salmon fishing with my father in the Straits of Juan de Fuca in Washington State I used to lean out over the water and try to look past my own face, past the reflection of the boat, past the sun and darkness, down to where the fish were surely swimming. I made up charm songs and word-hopes to tempt the fish, to cause them to mean biting my hook. I believed they would do it if I asked them well and patiently and with the right hope. I am writing my poems like this. I have used the fabric and the people of my life as the bait.
Tess GallagherHe thought her beautiful, believed her impeccably wise; dreamed of her, wrote poems to her, which, ignoring the subject, she corrected in red ink.
Virginia WoolfI'm partial to coffee shops, brain work, and poems on the page. I write after midnight. Sometimes, twisty syntax happens, and I surrender.
Marvin BellIf 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 MorrisseyI've not been a prolific poet, and it always seemed to me to be a bad idea to feel that you had to produce in order to get... credits. Production of a collection of poems every three years or every five years, or whatever, looks good, on paper. But it might not be good; it might be writing on a kind of automatic pilot.
James FentonGood acts are like good poems. One may easily get their drift, but they are not rationally understood.
Albert EinsteinMy novels and poems are meant to be read aloud. That's why jazz musicians have been able to adapt my stuff.
Ishmael ReedIf poets often commit suicide, it is not because their poems are bad but because they are good. Whoever heard of a bad poet committing suicide? The reader is only a little better off. The exhilaration of a good poem lasts twenty minutes, an hour at most. Unlike the scientist, the artist has reentry problems that are frequent and catastrophic.
Walker PercyGabriel 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 ZagajewskiThe genuine remains of Ossian, or those ancient poems which bear his name, though of less fame and extent, are, in many respects,of the same stamp with the Iliad itself. He asserts the dignity of the bard no less than Homer, and in his era, we hear of no other priest than he.
Henry David ThoreauI started out in life as a poet, I was only writing poetry all through my 20s, it wasn't until I was about 30 that I got serious about writing prose. While I was writing poems, I would often divert myself by reading detective novels, I liked them.
Paul AusterThere are poems about the internet and about the shipping forecast but very few by women celebrating men.
Germaine GreerAlmost 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 OliverI have always believed that poems beg to be read aloud, even if the reader is in a world all her own.
J. Patrick LewisI think we defy entropy and impermanence with our films and our poems. We hold onto each other a little harder and say, 'I will not let go. I do not accept the ephemeral nature of this moment. I'm going to extend it...forever. Or at least I'm going to try.'
Jason SilvaI 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 LauxEnjoy yourselves. And Hap: Don't let Umber near the arrows and bows; he's liable to shoot himself in the nose." Dodd grinned and snapped the reins, and the carriage rolled away. Umber sniffed. "One of his lesser poems. Come, Hap.
P.W. Cataneseeach new poem is partly propelled by the formal energies of all the poems that have preceded it in the history of literature.
May SartonI can't actually explain why my lines got shorter, but they did. Just as I can't explain why my early poems were 'all image' and my current ones are relatively abstract. The sense of the line changed with the theme, somehow my ear (or brain or heart/mind) fell in love with a short line and very very simple words.
Gregory OrrThe chances are that, in the course of his lifetime, the major poet will write more bad poems than the minor, simply because major poets write a lot.
W. H. AudenI'm not sure I had ever written a fan letter before to a poet I had not met, but that's what I did when I read two poems by Gregory Woods ... I admired them especially for their technical virtuosity, in that it was technique completely used, never for the sake of cleverness but as a component of feeling ... What an enviable talent Gregory Woods has
Thom GunnLike many modern poets, I tend to conceal rhymes by placing them in the middle of lines, and to avoid immediate alliteration and assonance in favor of echoes placed later in the poems.
Margaret AtwoodIt isn't so unusual for poems to situate themselves out of doors - though they may, at the same time, be set in an interior world: not inside the house but inside the mind and body of writer and reader.
Robert BringhurstWell, yes: people write poems when they are in love, but a wise man will not print them.
Hans Christian AndersenEver since I was little, Iโve loved making hand-made cards and presents and arts & crafts for people. The book gives me a similar experience. I love being able to hold this object in my hands and say, โThis is mine. I made this. It is a gift for you.โ I love that feeling. Especially since this particular object contains ten years worth of my poems.
Sarah Kay