Poems Quotes

Most victims of my autobiographical verse are either far too polite, remarkably understanding unaware that I have written poems about them.

Almost anything is too much. I am trying in my poems to have the reader be the experiencer. I do not want to be there. It is not even a walk we take together.

I think I'm a very good reader of poetry, but obviously, like everybody, I have a set of criteria for reading poems, and I'm not shy about presenting them, so if people ask for my critical response to a poem, I tell them what works and why, and what doesn't work and why.

I've always thought my poems told stories.

Why does one always ask a writer why they stopped? I am sure everyone finds in any drawer a few dear poems.

I can't understand these chaps who go round American universities explaining how they write poems: It's like going round explaining how you sleep with your wife.

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.

Besides the actual reading in class of many poems, I would suggest you do two things: first, while teaching everything you can and keeping free of it, teach that poetry is a mode of discourse that differs from logical exposition.

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

A discrete series is a series of terms each of which is empirically derived, each one of which is empirically true. And this is the reason for the fragmentary character of those poems.

I got $30 from Nation magazine for a poem and $500 for my first book of poems.

I seem to keep returning to my father in poems because his personality was so extreme, so driven. He did everything to excess.

Every so often I find some poems that are too good for the readers of The Atlantic because they are a little too involved with the nature of poetry, as such.

Today the U.S. is farther from being nourished by poetry than it was a hundred years ago, when books of poems were best-sellers.

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

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

I invented animals and birds - I had about two dozen. After working on them for six months, I sat down and just for fun wrote two dozen poems to accompany the drawings. It was for no one to every see, but a friend sent me in to an editor.

The only difference between me and others is that they think they can change something with cute little poems, nice cards or embracing trees and being nice to little lapdogs.

I used to carry about with me a German map-case filled with poems.

I am a guest of the French language. My poems in French are born of my interaction with the French language, which is not the same as that of a French poet.

Many of my poems are not sexual.

I started off in England and very few people knew I was Australian. I mean, the clues were in the poems, but they didn't read them very carefully, and so for years and years I was considered completely part of the English poetry scene.

I didn't think about whether I was writing poems. I was thinking. And the more I was thinking, the more there was I didn't understand.

The Black Mountain poet I like most is the early Creeley. Those early poems seem very lyrical and very traditional, with a lot of voice and character.

You know, I used to say, when people say, 'How do you think about what to write about in the poems every week?' And I say, 'Well, I have to turn it in on Monday, so on Sunday nights I turn the shower to iambic pentameter and it sort of works out that way.'

I liked the kid who wrote me that he had to do a term paper on a modern poet and he was doing me because, though they say you have to read poems twice, he found he could handle mine in one try.

I was writing notes, but not composing poems. The Hunter began to develop out of this fragmented process.

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

My poems were just kind of all over the place. They had no focus, no location, nothing. Kind of a series of images that could have been set anywhere. A lot of the poems were just exercises for myself.

There'll always be working people in my poems because I grew up with them, and I am a poet of memory.