Quotes About Poems

I don't think all poems need to be written in conversational language - those are often great poems but there should also be poems of incoherent bewilderment and muddled mystery.

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.

When I think of someone equating poems and machines, it makes me feel like that person would like poems to have a more obvious use value in society. They're not happy with poetry being this ephemeral, indefinable thing. They want it to be "real."

It's difficult to talk about [W.S.] Merwin's poems, as it's hard to talk about a feeling or a smell. It is what it is, but so much so that it overwhelms both sense and the senses. I aspire to something about his work, that imbues his poems, though I'm not sure I could say what that is. A purity, maybe, the kind of purity that comes from being beaten, like steel.

I have been writing. Even when I intend not to write, I find myself writing. I'm currently in a place where I should be putting together the fifth book, but then more poems are coming. It's exciting and somewhat daunting. You know how we are when a new book of poems is at last coming together - all frenzy, distraction, and bounty? It's as if I've turned into summer itself.

We had collaborated with Allen Ginsberg on one of his last projects just before he died in the spring of '97, a book called Illuminated Poems - it was Allen's poems and songs and I illustrated them. Or, I illuminated them with paintings and drawings that bounced off of them. You want the picture to relate to the text without it slavishly regurgitating it or merely illustrating it, because that's redundant. You want to show another angle of what the text is saying.

A decade ago, my poems were precious little boxes, small and claustrophobic, completely inward gazing. I didn't possess the command to speak beyond the self. Over the years, my poems have stretched out, grown broader and grander. The intervening years of living and aging - with their portions of tragedy, triumph, and shipwreck - have earned me both the authority and the necessity to write on a cosmic scale.

With 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.

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.

A 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.

Poems are difficult to silence.

I tend to like poems that engage me - that is to say, which do not bore me.

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.

There are not enough poems in praise of bed.

Bryan [Iguchi] had this beautiful philosophy about our connection with these incredible cycles. There's a line from one of his poems that always stays with me about 'This process we follow; this cycle we ride' and it's almost become a strap line for the film.

I write a lot, poems and such, and when I look at it the next day, I can analyze what the problem is and find the solution. It's the same when I watch myself on the big screen, but first, my vanity has to go away and so I have to watch it ten times. But when it has gone, and I don't think my nose is too big and everything else, then I start analyzing, and I think it helps me to become a better person.

A lot of young poets today, from what I've heard and experienced, can't get their heads past George W. Bush, and I've heard so many poems about this democracy and this era of politics that I'm kind of bored by it

My poems getting published in Russia doesn't make me feel in any fashion, to tell you the truth. I'm not trying to be coy, but it doesn't tickle my ego.

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

In HEATHEN, R. Flowers Rivera remixes the classical and the Biblical, the usual and the typical until what we thought we knew of ourselves and others is new again. The mythic becomes particular; the particular becomes mythic in these fascinating poems of personalities and personas. Rivera’s work is rich in empathy and invention. Heathen is a book of psalms for the present day.

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.

Look at Senegal, about 90% of the Muslims in Senegal are Tijani or Qadiri Sufis. Among them, they have very great teachers who have written poems about al-Hallaj, and they have not been killed. In fact, it's Sufism that brought Islam through all of Senegal, right under our noses the last couple of centuries. And you can go down the same line through Indonesia and Malaysia.

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.

Carol 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.

Poems seem to have a life of their own. They tell you when enough is enough.

The mathematical question is "Why?" It's always why. And the only way we know how to answer such questions is to come up, from scratch, with these narrative arguments that explain it. So what I want to do with this book is open up this world of mathematical reality, the creatures that we build there, the questions that we ask there, the ways in which we poke and prod (known as problems), and how we can possibly craft these elegant reason-poems.

My advice to aspiring poets is to find a community of other poets who are willing to read one another's work. And to read widely, in a variety of time periods and cultures, to identify which traits of poems are appealing and which aversive. And what can be stolen.

The poems are part of my attempt to understand being in the world in an honest way.

You must understand the whole of life, not just one little part of it. That is why you must read, that is why you must look at the skies, that is why you must sing and dance, and write poems and suffer and understand, for all that is life.

People used to say poems were different to songs but I don't think they are.

Everyone thinks they're going to write one book of poems or one novel.

Go back to The October Palace, which came out in 1994, and there are poems with windows, doors, the rooms of the gorgeous and vanishing palace that is this ordinary world and ordinary life. Jungian archetype would say the house is a figure for the experienced, experiencing self.

Poetry of all the forms of literature I think is the most suited for the digital age and for the shorter attention spans and all of that. It Twitters very easily, some lyric poems and it's very easy to zip a poem to someone, so that's one of the things I think is wonderful about poetry in the digital age.

There's always been what I would call the William Carlos Williams strain, in which poems of simplicity and clarity are valued by a different community. I was talking to Galway Kinnell one day, and he said that there was an audience for poetry up until about 1920 and then, from that point on, the poets and the critics drifted.

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.

The poets, therefore, however much they adorned the gods in their poems, and amplified their exploits with the highest praises, yet very frequently confess that all things are held together and governed by one spirit or mind.

Poems, novels - these things belong to the nation, to the culture and the people. They've been stolen from the people and now the stolen things are being returned to their owners, but I don't think their owners should be grateful to receive them.

I like to work with multiple sections because they lend themselves to the structure of the poem: its intensifications and arcs and closures. I feel like working with smaller units feels more natural to the way I write poems.

The number of people writing poems is vast, and their reasons for doing so are many, that much can be surmised from the stacks of submissions.

Most of the poems I write go through forty versions and then stay in a file on my computer. I'm not very good at sending stuff out or feeling that something is ready to send out and I never have been. Part of the problem is that as soon as a poem is finished, it stops being all that interesting to me.

I don't remember the first poem that I wrote because I've been creating poems since I was around 2 or 3. I don't have any memory of that but my mom has written evidence of it. I've always liked playing with words so when I was younger it had a lot more to do with rhyme and sounds.

I am completing a book I began back in 2002 called 'Poems in the Manner of.' 'The Matador of Metaphor' is from this manuscript. It is an homage to Wallace Stevens that appropriates certain of his techniques.

Remember the plants, trees, animal life who all have their families, their histories too. Talk to them, listen to them. They are alive poems.

I have seen too many men wilt and go silly under a little light, and then they continue to write and get published, turning out pure crap under a name that has become a bad habit. The next poem is all that counts. You can't stand on past poems.

If 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.

Poems very seldom consist of poetry and nothing else; and pleasure can be derived also from their other ingredients. I am convinced that most readers, when they think they are admiring poetry, are deceived by inability to analyse their sensations, and that they are really admiring, not the poetry of the passage before them, but something else in it, which they like better than poetry.

There were a hundred booksellers in the old round city founded by the eighth-century caliph al-Mansur. The café and wine-drinking culture of Baghdad has been famous for centuries; there was a whole school of Iraqi poets who wrote poems about the wine bars of medieval Baghdad - the khamriyaat, or wine songs, that I quote in the book.

Lucky accidents seldom happen to writers who don't work. You will find that you may rewrite and rewrite a poem and it never seems quite right. Then a much better poem may come rather fast and you wonder why you bothered with all that work on the earlier poem. Actually, the hard work you do on one poem is put in on all poems. The hard work on the first poem is responsible for the sudden ease of the second. If you just sit around waiting for the easy ones, nothing will come. Get to work.