Each word bears its weight, so you have to read my poems quite slowly.
~By Anne Stevenson ~
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 ~
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 ~
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 ~
I admire Ginsberg as a poet, despite the fact that he seems not to know when he is being good and when he is bad. But he will last, or at least those poems will last.
~By Leslie Fiedler ~
As a friendly one. I would still like to write concrete poems, but I can only do it sometimes.
~By Ian Hamilton Finlay ~
I don't write poems and put them to music. Just let things flow.
~By Martin Gore ~
What I'm fighting for now in my work... for an expression relevant to all manner of blacks, poems I could take into a tavern, into the street, into the halls of a housing project.
~By Gwendolyn Brooks ~
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 ~
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 ~
In other words the pictures are in a kind of relationship with each other which is touching only at points rather than pictures being illustrations of poems or poems extrapolations of the pictures.
~By Peter Porter ~
I like Beethoven, especially the poems.
~By Ringo Starr ~
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 ~
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 went on all over the States, ranting poems to enthusiastic audiences that, the week before, had been equally enthusiastic about lectures on Railway Development or the Modern Turkish Essay.
~By Dylan Thomas ~
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 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 ~
Everyone thinks they're going to write one book of poems or one novel.
~By Marilyn Hacker ~
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 ~
If I wasn't writing poems I'd be washing my hands all the time.
~By Sherman Alexie ~
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 ~
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 ~
To me many short poems read and write like beginnings that simply whet my appetite; I want to get over that.
~By John Barton ~
My first collection of poems was published by Bloodaxe Books, which was then a very new imprint.
~By Helen Dunmore ~
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 ~
If I were brave enough to say so, I'd like to think that I had written some poems that people are not going to forget.
~By Peter Davison ~
People can put their best poems straight onto the web.
~By Roger McGough ~
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 ~
Many of my poems are not sexual.
~By Thom Gunn ~
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 ~
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 ~
A lot of young poets today, from what I've heard and experienced, can't get their heads past George W. Bush, and I've heard so many poems about this democracy and this era of politics that I'm kind of bored by it.
~By Amber Tamblyn ~
I used to carry about with me a German map-case filled with poems.
~By John C. Hawkes ~
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 ~
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 ~
We all write poems; it is simply that poets are the ones who write in words.
~By John Fowles ~
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 ~
Sometimes poetry is inspired by the conversation entered into by reading other poems.
~By John Barton ~
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 write the poems first, with only a few exceptions for odd reasons, where I'm given the illustration first.
~By Jack Prelutsky ~
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 ~
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 ~
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.
~By Mary Oliver ~
Early on, if I was alone two three nights in a row, I'd start writing poems about suicide.
~By Jack Nicholson ~
I also write poems, so that is something that I really enjoy.
~By Billy Sherwood ~
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 was writing notes, but not composing poems. The Hunter began to develop out of this fragmented process.
~By George Murray ~
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.
~By Diane Wakoski ~
In our period, they say there is free speech. They say there is no penalty for poets, There is no penalty for writing poems. They say this. This is the penalty.
~By Muriel Rukeyser ~
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 ~
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 ~
How do poems grow? They grow out of your life.
~By Robert Penn Warren ~
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 ~
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 ~
Poems seem to have a life of their own. They tell you when enough is enough.
~By Thomas Lynch ~
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'm terrified of switching the computer on because there are so many poems.
~By Roger McGough ~
The reason one writes poems is so that your poem will be remembered.
~By Peter Davison ~
I tend to like poems that engage me - that is to say, which do not bore me.
~By Mark Strand ~
I've always thought my poems told stories.
~By Douglas Dunn ~
When I first started to write, I was aware of being queer, but I didn't write about it. Queer poems would probably not have been accepted by the editors I sent them to.
~By Thom Gunn ~
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 work very hard on all my poems, but most of the work consists of trying not to sound as if I had worked. I try to make them sound as natural as possible, but within a quite strict form, which to my ears has a lot to do with musical rhythm and sound.
~By Anne Stevenson ~
Ginsberg's Collected Poems contains a wonderful poem about making it with Neal Cassady.
~By Thom Gunn ~
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 ~
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 ~
The poets, therefore, however much they adorned the gods in their poems, and amplified their exploits with the highest praises, yet very frequently confess that all things are held together and governed by one spirit or mind.
~By Lactantius ~
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 ~
I don't expect you'll hear me writing any poems to the greater glory of Ronald and Nancy Reagan.
~By Robert Penn Warren ~
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.
~By Tahar Ben Jelloun ~
I learned to play guitar at a young age and converted poems and stuff that I had written to songs.
~By Gregory Harrison ~
All I wanted to do was write - at the time, poems, and prose, too. I guess my ambition was simply to make money however I could to keep myself going in some modest way, and I didn't need much, I was unmarried at the time, no children.
~By Paul Auster ~
We read Robert Browning's poetry. Here we needed no guidance from the professor: the poems themselves were enough.
~By Carl Sandburg ~
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 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 ~
I sometimes like to tinker with poems that have failed, ones that I have sent aside. Even years afterward, I will revisit them if there is something about them that I cannot give up on.
~By John Barton ~
My earlier poems were sadder than my poems are today, perhaps because I wrote them in confusion or when I was unhappy. But I am not a melancholy person, quite the contrary, no one enjoys laughing more than I do.
~By Anne Stevenson ~
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 ~
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 ~
Of the individual poems, some are more lyric and some are more descriptive or narrative. Each poem is fixed in a moment. All those moments written or read together take on the movement and architecture of a narrative.
~By Marilyn Hacker ~
I like poems that are complex.
~By Peter Davison ~
You must understand the whole of life, not just one little part of it. That is why you must read, that is why you must look at the skies, that is why you must sing and dance, and write poems and suffer and understand, for all that is life.
~By Jiddu Krishnamurti ~
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 ~
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 ~
No poems can please for long or live that are written by water drinkers.
~By Horace ~
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 ~
I got $30 from Nation magazine for a poem and $500 for my first book of poems.
~By Jim Harrison ~
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 ~
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 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 wanted a perfect ending. Now I've learned, the hard way, that some poems don't rhyme, and some stories don't have a clear beginning, middle and end.
~By Gilda Radner ~
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 ~
Yes, I do often write poems from the mind, but I hope I don't ignore feelings and emotions.
~By Anne Stevenson ~
I would not say I chose to write long poems on a conscious level. The long poem has been a relative constant.
~By John Barton ~
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 ~
The few bad poems which occasionally are created during abstinence are of no great interest.
~By Wilhelm Reich ~
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 consider my films to be poems that are all as personal as my writing and as hand-made.
~By James Broughton ~
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 ~
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 ~
|