Poem Quotes

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.

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.

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.

I would not say I chose to write long poems on a conscious level. The long poem has been a relative constant.

I sometimes talk about the making of a poem within the poem.

A poem may be an instance of morality, of social conditions, of psychological history; it may instance all its qualities, but never one of them alone, nor any two or three; never less than all.

The poem is the literary form of the 21st century. It's able to connect young people in a deep way to language... it's language as play.

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.

In a funny way, poems are suited to modern life. They're short, they're intense. Nobody has time to read a 700-page book. People read magazines, and a poem takes less time than an article.

I was reading the dictionary. I thought it was a poem about everything.

If you know what you are going to write when you're writing a poem, it's going to be average.

No poem, not even Shakespeare or Milton or Chaucer, is ever strong enough to totally exclude every crucial precursor text or poem.

A poem in form still has to have voice, gesture, a sense of discovery, a metaphoric connection, as any poetry does.

When you read and understand a poem, comprehending its rich and formal meanings, then you master chaos a little.