Quotes About Poems

There are many poets that use as my models. In my first book of poems, I had several for the "Sleepwalkers," I had several poems that were apprentice poems like this in which I take a walk with a poet who is no longer alive.

If the motive of writing is for some people a kind of exercise in dirty laundry, that's one thing. I've always thought of my poems as meant to be overheard, as I think all of these poems are. It seems to me if you get experience right, even your most painful or humiliating experiences - if you get those experiences right for yourself and make discoveries as you go along and find for them some formal glue - they will be poems for others.

When I go to the shore, I take along the poems of Pablo Neruda. I suppose it's because the poems are simultaneously lush and ripe and kind of lazy, yet throbbing with life - like summer itself.

If 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.

The grotesque in my poems is the motion I use to put myself and the grotesque world together. So the miserable images I use in my poems are the same as the letters I send into the miserable world.

I love to read long books. I enjoy experiencing that extension. But it's not something I feel comfortable with and not something I think I can gain comfort with by practice. It was a real struggle for me while writing memoir to get past three pages or so. In poems, I can write long poems. But length in prose: no.

I've changed over my writing life. If I can generalize, I would say that the more recent poems - believe it or not - are more pointedly political; although, if the earlier poems were more existential, they were still political; though, in their own way, had a complicated presence.

[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.

During 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.'

Alienation between the content and form happens frequently in my poems because I obstinately carry on dismantling my body, an act you can also call "dismantling delusion." I think that after I dismantle my female body, I can finally dismantle established lyric poems.

So for whatever reason those short lines just felt right to me, in my physical self. They were right for the movement of the poems. Some poems in the book have longer lines.

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

I started then to try and shape something rather than just express it and when I started to shape something and to imitate other poems that were written by other people, when I had tried to integrate my reading and my writing I was on my path.

When I applied to Stanford, I applied for graduate work in the PhD program, not to the creative writing program, mostly because though I had some vague ambition of becoming a writer and I was trying to write poems and essays and stories, I didn't feel like I was far enough along to submit work to some place and have it judged.

My songs were influenced not so much by poetry on the page but by poetry being recited by the poets who recited poems with jazz bands.

True love requires action. We can speak of love all day long, we can write notes or poems that proclaim it, sing songs that praise it, and preach sermons that encourage it but until we manifest that love in action, our words are nothing but sounding brass, or a tinkling cymbal.

Writing poems is my way of celebrating with the world that I have not committed suicide the evening before.

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.

Horace, when he wrote the Ars Poetica, recommended that poets keep their poems home for ten years; don't let them go, don't publish them until you have kept them around for ten years: by that time, they ought to stop moving on you; by that time, you ought to have them right.

Each man has his own batch of poems.

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.

Today is the first of August. It is hot, steamy and wet. It is raining. I am tempted to write a poem. But I remember what it said on one rejection slip: 'After a heavy rainfall, poems titled 'Rain' pour in from across the nation.

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.

Poems are other people's snapshots in which we see our own lives.

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.

I 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.

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

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.

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.

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

The world is so great and rich, and life so full of variety, that you can never lack occasions for poems.

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

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.

How do poems grow? They grow out of your life.

I treat myself as one of the sources. And, again, I think that’s accurate. One of the poets I read most frequently is myself. I really do. I read my own poems obsessively.

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.

Many of my poems try to use a comic element to reach a place that isn't comic at all. The comic element works as a surprise. It is unexpected and energizing.

There are some books in which every poem is a facet of the same thing. So the book is like a piece of music. And there are books of poems that I love so much that I carry them around with me.

Is there an aesthetic "fit" in my work between God and the world? The "I' in my poems has from the beginning identified himself as Catholic, and my books certainly can be read as presenting a Catholic theology "in a very particular sense." Catholicism is a faith morally identified with the human struggle for human dignity and justice. It is a vision of the world incarnationally rooted in the senses, a faith of and in spoken and written words - Scripture, "the Word of God," the Logos.

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.

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.

Even though we've written epic poems and made incredible films about love, I still don't think anyone can understand what it is, or why it means everything.

No, I don't know any Emily Dickinson poems!

Do you know, Considering the market, there are more Poems produced than any other thing? No wonder poets sometimes have to seem So much more businesslike than businessmen. Their wares are so much harder to get rid of.

The only thing I remember writing in prison is a couple of poems for an inmate magazine they did once a year.

I learned to play guitar at a young age and converted poems and stuff that I had written to songs.

There is no comment on pictures but pictures, on music but music, on poems but poetry. If you do, you do. If you don't, you don't. And that's all there is to that.