Each word bears its weight, so you have to read my poems quite slowly.
~By Anne Stevenson ~
I don't know why Sinclair Lewis fell in love with me. He didn't get even the slightest response from me. But his letters were lovely. And the poems he wrote me were lovely. I used some of them in my book.
~By Fay Wray ~
I still read Donne, particularly his love poems.
~By Carol Ann Duffy ~
Indeed, I would venture to guess that Anon, who wrote so many poems without signing them, was often a woman.
~By Virginia Woolf ~
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.
~By David Antin ~
People can put their best poems straight onto the web.
~By Roger McGough ~
There must of course be a relationship between translating and making poems of your own, but what it is I just don't know.
~By Robert Fitzgerald ~
And Robert Lowell, of course - in his poems, we're not located in his actual life. We're located more in the externals, in the journalistic facts of his life.
~By Mark Strand ~
Sometimes poetry is inspired by the conversation entered into by reading other poems.
~By John Barton ~
Don't be too harsh to these poems until they're typed. I always think typescript lends some sort of certainty: at least, if the things are bad then, they appear to be bad with conviction.
~By Dylan Thomas ~
On that other novels followed: but I still wrote fairy tales and dreamy poems of another world.
~By Laurence Housman ~
I seem to keep returning to my father in poems because his personality was so extreme, so driven. He did everything to excess.
~By Robert Morgan ~
My brother used to say that I wrote faster than he could read. He wrote two books - of poems - better than all mine put together.
~By Laurence Housman ~
If I were assigned poems I suppose I'd write more of them but it is entirely voluntary and for the most part ignored in the market sense of the word so the language to me is most intimate, most important, most sublime and most satisfying when it gets done.
~By Thomas Lynch ~
The notes I have made are not a diary in the ordinary sense, but partly lengthy records of my spiritual experiences, and partly poems in prose.
~By Edvard Munch ~
I consider my films to be poems that are all as personal as my writing and as hand-made.
~By James Broughton ~
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.
~By A. R. Ammons ~
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.
~By Peter Davison ~
Well, the great thing for me about poetry is that in good poems the dislocation of words, that is to say, the distance between what they say they're saying and what they are actually saying is at its greatest.
~By Harry Mathews ~
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.
~By Peter Porter ~
Early on, if I was alone two three nights in a row, I'd start writing poems about suicide.
~By Jack Nicholson ~
There's not too much difference between writing a picture book and writing a collection of a hundred poems or so, except that the bigger books take a lot longer to do.
~By Jack Prelutsky ~
It may be said that poems are in one way like icebergs: only about a third of their bulk appears above the surface of the page.
~By Howard Nemerov ~
I try to apply colors like words that shape poems, like notes that shape music.
~By Joan Miro ~
These poems, with all their crudities, doubts, and confusions, are written for the love of Man and in praise of God, and I'd be a damn' fool if they weren't.
~By Dylan Thomas ~
My favorite poets may not be your bread and butter. I have more favorite poems than favorite poets.
~By Rita Dove ~
I have learned so much from working with other poets, travelling and reading with them, spending days discussing poems in progress. There is the sense that we are all, as writers, part of something which is more powerful than any of us.
~By Helen Dunmore ~
Well, "The Wellspring" was written from 1983 to 1986. And it had a section in the beginning that was poems that began from others' experience.
~By Sharon Olds ~
I also write poems, so that is something that I really enjoy.
~By Billy Sherwood ~
Each poem in becoming generates the laws by which it is generated: extensions of the laws to other poems never completely take.
~By A. R. Ammons ~
I would like to be proud of having written some poems that will be remembered, but I will never know whether I will have any reason to be proud of that.
~By Peter Davison ~
Criticism starts - it has to start - with a real passion for reading. It can come in adolescence, even in your twenties, but you must fall in love with poems.
~By Harold Bloom ~
Southern poets are still writing narrative poems, poems in forms, dramatic poems.
~By Robert Morgan ~
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.
~By Mark Strand ~
My readers at that time were still men of letters; but there had to be other people waiting to read my poems.
~By Salvatore Quasimodo ~
I've thought of the last line of some poems for years and tried them out, It wouldn't work because the last line was much too beautiful for the poem.
~By Howard Nemerov ~
The reason one writes poems is so that your poem will be remembered.
~By Peter Davison ~
Once I planned to write a book of poems entirely about the things in my pocket. But I found it would be too long; and the age of the great epics is past.
~By Gilbert K. Chesterton ~
You don't help people in your poems. I've been trying to help people all my life - that's my trouble.
~By Charles Olson ~
To me many short poems read and write like beginnings that simply whet my appetite; I want to get over that.
~By John Barton ~
As a child, what captivated me was reading the poems myself and realizing that there was a world without material substance which was nevertheless as alive as any other.
~By Mary Oliver ~
I don't expect you'll hear me writing any poems to the greater glory of Ronald and Nancy Reagan.
~By Robert Penn Warren ~
On July 26, 1916, I announced to all my friends in America that from now on I resolved to write no more poems in the classical language, and to begin my experiments in writing poetry in the so-called vulgar tongue of the people.
~By Hu Shih ~
Poems seem to have a life of their own. They tell you when enough is enough.
~By Thomas Lynch ~
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.
~By Marilyn Hacker ~
I would venture to guess that Anon, who wrote so many poems without signing them, was often a woman.
~By Virginia Woolf ~
Many poets write books. They'll tell you: Well, I've got my next book, but there are two poems I need to write, one about x, one about y. This is a wonder to me.
~By Sharon Olds ~
Why does one always ask a writer why they stopped? I am sure everyone finds in any drawer a few dear poems.
~By Peter Bichsel ~
It all has to do with art - writing, painting, things I've done for a long time but just never had enough time to pursue. I have poetry - things that are designed for songs, but they're always poems first.
~By Jason Newsted ~
We read Robert Browning's poetry. Here we needed no guidance from the professor: the poems themselves were enough.
~By Carl Sandburg ~
Everyone thinks they're going to write one book of poems or one novel.
~By Marilyn Hacker ~
I have also written some poems which have not been collected in a volume.
~By Grazia Deledda ~
For instance, it's a little better now than it was two or three years ago, but something like 70% of the poems I receive seem to be written in the present indicative.
~By Peter Davison ~
Well it is certainly the case that the poems - which were in fact published during Shakespeare's lifetime - are weird if they began or originated in this form, as I think they did, because the poems get out of control.
~By Stephen Greenblatt ~
By reason of weird translation, many such sets of instructions read like poems anyhow.
~By Brian Ferneyhough ~
The few bad poems which occasionally are created during abstinence are of no great interest.
~By Wilhelm Reich ~
I say that democracy can never prove itself beyond cavil, until it founds and luxuriantly grows its own forms of art, poems, schools, theology, displacing all that exists, or that has been produced anywhere in the past, under opposite influences.
~By Walt Whitman ~
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.
~By Howard Nemerov ~
My poems are almost all written as Diane. I don't have any problems with that, and if other women choose to identify with this, I think that's terrific.
~By Diane Wakoski ~
My first collection of poems was published by Bloodaxe Books, which was then a very new imprint.
~By Helen Dunmore ~
I tend to like poems that engage me - that is to say, which do not bore me.
~By Mark Strand ~
Most victims of my autobiographical verse are either far too polite, remarkably understanding unaware that I have written poems about them.
~By John Barton ~
I play with language a great deal in my poems, and I enjoy that. I try to condense language, that is, I try to express complicated but I hope real emotions as simply as possible. But that doesn't mean the poems are simple, just that they are as truthful as I can make them.
~By Anne Stevenson ~
If I wasn't writing poems I'd be washing my hands all the time.
~By Sherman Alexie ~
Of course the other and more serious way in which it all happens is that one finds in poems and language some quality one appropriates for oneself and wishes to reproduce.
~By Robert Fitzgerald ~
I'm terrified of switching the computer on because there are so many poems.
~By Roger McGough ~
I wrote those poems for myself, as a way of being a soldier here in this country. I didn't know the poems would travel. I didn't go to Lebanon until two years ago, but people told me that many Arabs had memorized these poems and translated them into Arabic.
~By June Jordan ~
I love chapbooks. They're in some ways the ideal form in which to publish and read poems. You can read 19 poems in a way you can't sit down and read 60 to 70 pages of poems.
~By Robert Morgan ~
My horizon on humanity is enlarged by reading the writers of poems, seeing a painting, listening to some music, some opera, which has nothing at all to do with a volatile human condition or struggle or whatever. It enriches me as a human being.
~By Wole Soyinka ~
However, I began to submit poems to British magazines, and some were accepted. It was a great moment to see my first poems published. It felt like entering a tradition.
~By Helen Dunmore ~
The ancient Greek oral poets all had this anxiety about the deficiencies of their memories and always began poems by praying to the Muse to help them remember.
~By David Antin ~
I was in Paris at an English-language bookstore. I picked up a volume of Dickinson's poetry. I came back to my hotel, read 2,000 of her poems and immediately began composing in my head. I wrote down the melodies even before I got to a piano.
~By Gordon Getty ~
I like poems that are little games.
~By Peter Davison ~
The best books of our times have included the three mature volumes of Philip Larkin. They're very short books of poems, and very carefully arranged.
~By Robert Morgan ~
I got $30 from Nation magazine for a poem and $500 for my first book of poems.
~By Jim Harrison ~
Many of my poems are not sexual.
~By Thom Gunn ~
There's one of my new poems actually - is a good example of where my poetry has ended up. My earlier river poetry was more like a cross between Shelley and Dylan Thomas.
~By Robert Adamson ~
I used to carry about with me a German map-case filled with poems.
~By John C. Hawkes ~
After I'd produced about two dozen pen and ink drawings, one evening I decided that they needed poems to accompany them. I still have no idea where that notion came from, but it took me about two hours to produce verses for these creatures.
~By Jack Prelutsky ~
I've always thought my poems told stories.
~By Douglas Dunn ~
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.
~By James Welch ~
We have a lot of long narrative poems written in the 20th century, but they're not very well known, and they're not read by very many people.
~By Robert Morgan ~
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.
~By Philip Larkin ~
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.
~By George Oppen ~
Spring has returned. The Earth is like a child that knows poems.
~By Rainer Maria Rilke ~
I was very committed to the process of composing, working at poems, putting things together and taking them apart like some kind of experimental filmmaker.
~By David Antin ~
I like Beethoven, especially the poems.
~By Ringo Starr ~
There'll always be working people in my poems because I grew up with them, and I am a poet of memory.
~By Philip Levine ~
I like poems that are complex.
~By Peter Davison ~
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.
~By Henry Rollins ~
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.
~By Jack Prelutsky ~
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.
~By James Broughton ~
I write the poems first, with only a few exceptions for odd reasons, where I'm given the illustration first.
~By Jack Prelutsky ~
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.
~By Robert Morgan ~
My earliest poems sing of the absolute necessity of allowing love to invade and pervade one's life. That can make the miracle happen in reality. Try it.
~By James Broughton ~
It is commonly asserted and accepted that Paradise Lost is among the two or three greatest English poems; it may justly be taken as the type of supreme poetic achievement in our literature.
~By John Drinkwater ~
I've already written 300 space poems. But I look upon my ultimate form as being a poetic prose. When you read it, it appears to be prose, but within the prose you have embedded the techniques of poetry.
~By Story Musgrave ~
We all write poems; it is simply that poets are the ones who write in words.
~By John Fowles ~
I wrote poems in my corner of the Brooks Street station. I sent them to two editors who rejected them right off. I read those letters of rejection years later and I agreed with those editors.
~By Carl Sandburg ~
It's easy to understand why the most beautiful poems about England in the spring were written by poets living in Italy at the time.
~By Philip Dunne ~
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