Quotes About Poems

I think that the casual reader and the lyric and confession are trickily tied up together. I mean often when I read my students' poems my first impulse is to say, "O, the subject of this pronoun, this 'I,' is whatever kid wrote this poem." The audience for lyric poems is "confessionalized" to some extent. And I think this audience tends to find long narrative poems, for instance, kind of bewildering.

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.

I 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.

I've been working on a collection of prose vignettes about girls I've had crushes on, from the age of six to the age of eighteen. This manuscript is thematic and organized in a way my poems about my friends aren't. My friends get into the poems simply because they mean a lot to me.

As 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.

Lizzie Harris's Stop Wanting is an unflinching book about a girlhood filled with violence, doubt, vulnerability, and loss. These gorgeously crafted and hauntingly memorable poems are a bleak place full of life, prayer, and the kind of answers only poems like these can provide.

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.

My earlier poems were sadder than my poems are today, perhaps because I wrote them in confusion or when I was unhappy. But I am not a melancholy person, quite the contrary, no one enjoys laughing more than I do.

[My poems] of course, it's symbolic, in the way that things in a poem can be - that is, pointing to something beyond its mere ordinary meaning, while also retaining all the qualities of that ordinary meaning. In other words, it's a bear, but it's also suggesting something else, just by virtue of the attention to it. But it's not "symbolic" in that way we are taught to think about things in poems.

I think if you put something in a file that says "war poems" or "love poems" that you already restrict the way in which the poem might move.

I see no reason to spend your life writing poems unless your goal is to write great poems.

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.

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

There are not enough poems in praise of bed.

When you draw, you copy the world don't you? You remake it on paper, but it isn't the same. It's yours. No one else could have created it just like that. When I make poems, I use the words we all use, but the order and the sound create a new power. This wood is someone's creation. We stumble through it's tendrils, as if we're crawling through the synapses of his mind.

But in a lot of ways my poems are very conventional, and it's no big deal for me to write a poem in either free verse or strict form; modern poets can, and do, do both.

I don't think I'd ever get any better as a poet if I didn't push myself, very deliberately, to grow. My best poems surprise me, as they should, but I fight them at every turn, possibly just because I'm stubborn.

I've been an inveterate reader of literary magazines since I was a teenager. There are always discoveries. You're sitting in your easy chair, reading; you realize you've read a story or a group of poems four times, and you know, Yes, I want to go farther with this writer.

My earliest poems were a way of talking to somebody. I suppose to myself.

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.

When I was about twenty-one, I published a few poems. Maybe I wrote a couple of stories before, but I really began to write stories in my mid-thirties. My kids were still little, and they were in school and day care, and I had begun to think a lot about wanting to tell some stories and not being able to do it in poetry.

Gabriel 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.

Like so many aspiring writers who still have boxes of things they've written in their parents' houses, I filled notebooks with half-finished poems and stories and first paragraphs of novels that never got written.

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

The 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.

Always 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.

To see the Summer Sky Is Poetry, though never in a Book it lie— True Poems flee—

I think a book-length poem stands about as good a chance as a collection of individual poems in reaching its field of ears. This does not mean I have not found some of them too daunting to read all the way through, but it would seem there ought to be some ambition on the writer's part to create a work that would be "a read" all the way through. If not, all the pleasure belongs to the maker, and that in itself is something, an achievement.

As a child, what captivated me was reading the poems myself and realizing that there was a world without material substance which was nevertheless as alive as any other.

I 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.

Irish history having been forbidden in schools, has been, to a great extent, learned from Raftery's poems by the people of Mayo, where he was born, and of Galway, where he spent his later years.

I’m not a woman you bring home to Mother, pick out china patterns with, or Mary forefend, breed. I’ve seen a chunk of the universe, true, but there’s still so much more to see. I doubt I’ll ever cure this wanderlust, and I’m content with dedicating my life to failing to sate it... He’s never going to sit at my feet and write me poems, which is good because I hate poetry, except dirty ones that rhyme.

Poems come from incomplete knowledge.

I always wanted to be some kind of writer - I wrote plays and songs and "books" before I realized living and breathing people still wrote poems.

I live alone, perhaps for no good reason, for the reason that I am an impossible creature, set apart by a temperament I have never learned to use as it could be used, thrown off by a word, a glance, a rainy day, or one drink too many. My need to be alone is balanced against my fear of what will happen when suddenly I enter the huge empty silence if I cannot find support there. I go up to Heaven and down to Hell in an hour, and keep alive only by imposing upon myself inexorable routines. I write too many letters and too few poems.

People live for love. They kill for love. They die for love. They have songs, poems, novels, sculptures, paintings, myths, legends. It's one of the most powerful brain systems on Earth for both great joy and great sorrow.

Writing and reading are the only ways to find your voice. It won't magically burst forth in your poems the next time you sit down to write, or the next; but little by little, as you become aware of more choices and begin to make them -- consciously and unconsciously -- your style will develop.

With my poems, I finally won even my mother. The longest wooing of my life.

I'm not lookin' for someone who can save me. Life rafts might keep you afloat but they rarely get you anywhere and I've got places I wanna go. So break me in two, peel back my rib cage and cover every page of my heart with love poems you will burn someday.

I don't like poems that invent memories, I have enough of my own.

When I was home, traditionally since I was young, I'd write in cafés. That was the romantic notion in 1963. Café atmospheres back then were different. The café 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 café and the music is really loud, people are having business meetings, they are on their cellphones. It changes from generation to generation.

I'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

We have a lot of long narrative poems written in the 20th century, but they're not very well known, and they're not read by very many people.

Writing is performative - and while, yes, the words in essence will be there "forever," poems are often about ecstatic moments rather than trying to pin down a particular truth of an event.

I do believe that one's writing life needs to be kept separate from Po-Biz. Personally, I deal with this by not attending too many poetry readings, primarily reading dead poets or poems in translation, reading Poets & Writers only once for grant/contest information before I quickly dispose of it, and not reading Poetry Daily. Ever.

Everyone's taste is different. But I think the best way to defend against regrets after opening night is to try your best to tell the story you want to tell. In terms of smaller changes over time, I think good plays are like poems. Every syllable counts.

I don't expect you'll hear me writing any poems to the greater glory of Ronald and Nancy Reagan.

The ancient Greek "oral poets" all had this anxiety about the deficiencies of their memories and always began poems by praying to the muse to help them remember.