Poem Quotes

What I try to do is to go into a poem - and one writes them, of course, poem by poem - to go into each poem, first of all without having any sense whatsoever of where it's going to end up.

I see the poem or the novel ending with an open door.

The figure a poem makes. It begins in delight and ends in wisdom... in a clarification of life - not necessarily a great clarification, such as sects and cults are founded on, but in a momentary stay against confusion.

For what is a poem but a hazardous attempt at self-understanding: it is the deepest part of autobiography.

Of course a poem is a two-way street. No poem is any good if it doesn't suggest to the reader things from his own mind and recollection that he will read into it, and will add to what the poet has suggested. But I do think poetry readings are very important.

I shall try to write a poem that is about the moment but doesn't betray things that are true to me as a poet.

The composition of a single melody is born out of a bit of text, perhaps the first line, but it can also be the entire strophe; it can even be the poem's overall form.

I'm writing a poem right now about a nose. I've always wanted to write a poem about a nose. But it's a ludicrous subject. That's why, when I was younger, I was afraid of something that didn't make a lot of sense. But now I'm not. I have nothing to worry about. It doesn't matter.

However, if a poem can be reduced to a prose sentence, there can't be much to it.

If I wrote in a sonnet form, I would be distorting. Or if I had some great new idea for line breaks and I used it in a poem, but it's really not right for that poem, but I wanted it, that would be distorting.

No, I think that a person writes a poem because they have an inner urge of something that they want to express, and I think it's that inner urge that you want to express when you write a piece of music.

Reading a poem aloud to an audience is gestural as much as precise.

Again like Williams, with the emphasis now regrettable, when a man makes a poem, makes it mind you, he takes the words as he finds them lying interrelated about him.

It took some time to gather the research and develop it into the storyline, and to finally finish an origin myth poem that I had been working on for twenty years.

A poem need not have a meaning and like most things in nature often does not have.

Still the question remains of what actually speaks in a poem, if not subjectivity as historically constructed.

I've never read a political poem that's accomplished anything. Poetry makes things happen, but rarely what the poet wants.

My sense of a poem - my notion of how you revise - is: you get yourself into a state where what you are intensely conscious of is not why you wrote it or how you wrote it, but what you wrote.

I usually write for the individual reader -though I would like to have many such readers. There are some poets who write for people assembled in big rooms, so they can live through something collectively. I prefer my reader to take my poem and have a one-on-one relationship with it.

A writer's work often reflects what he or she has been exposed to in life; experiences which are the groundwork of a poem or a story.

An experienced reader uses the poem as an agent of inquiry. This makes poetry very exciting, unstable, and interactive.

At the point where I'm trying to force something and it's not happening, and I'm getting frustrated with, say, writing a poem, I can go and pick up the brushes and start painting. At the point where the painting seems to not be going anywhere, I go and pick up the guitar.

What is the poem, after it is written? That is the question. Not where it came from or why.

I am always pleased to be asked to write a poem.

And your very flesh shall be a great poem.

The heart of the matter seems to me to be the direct interaction between one's making a poem in English and a poem in the language that one understands and values. I don't see how you can do it otherwise.

I deliberately wrote a poem in my last book where I was suggesting that there are other passions as great as or more important than the passion of sex.

A poem begins in delight and ends in wisdom.

I always say that I'll have a go and see whether the poem works and if it does, then fine.

The beautiful feeling after writing a poem is on the whole better even than after sex, and that's saying a lot.