The poem is a little myth of man's capacity of making life meaningful. And in the end, the poem is not a thing we see-it is, rather, a light by which we may see-and what we see is life.
When I go to the shore, I take along the poems of Pablo Neruda. I suppose it's because the poems are simultaneously lush and ripe and kind of lazy, yet throbbing with life - like summer itself.
People who attack biography choose as their models vulgar and offensive biography. You could equally attack novels or poems by choosing bad poems or novels.
This poem has been called obscure. I refuse to believe that it is obscurer than pity, violence, or suffering. But being a poem, not a lifetime, it is more compressed.
No poem, not even Shakespeare or Milton or Chaucer, is ever strong enough to totally exclude every crucial precursor text or poem.
My favourite poem is called 'Roots and Wings' - it's a very moving poem about how if you've got real roots you can fly.
I don't think of poetry as a 'rational' activity but as an aural one. My poems usually begin with words or phrases which appeal more because of their sound than their meaning, and the movement and phrasing of a poem are very important to me.
Sometimes I write quickly, sometimes I spend several weeks on a single poem. I would really love for readers not to be able to guess which of the poems took so much work!
I want to write poems which are very emotional, but I would have some hesitation in saying I want to write poems which are sentimental.
There’s plenty of room for strangeness, mystery, originality, wildness, etc. in poems that also invite the reader into the human and alive center about which the poem circles.
Even the simplest poem May destroy your immunity to human emotions. All poems must carry a Government warning. Words Can seriously affect your heart.
Other times when I hear the wind blow I feel that just hearing the wind blow makes it worth being born.
It’s an already inside outside, The philosophers say it’s the soul But it’s not the soul: it’s the animal or the man itself In its way of existing.
When the suicide arrived at the sky, the people there asked him: "Why?" He replied: "Because no one admired me.
We never know how high we are till we are called to rise. Then if we are true to form our statures touch the skies.
Spend the years of learning squandering Courage for the years of wandering Through a world politely turning From the loutishness of learning.
Like seasonless fowl we migrate… from East Coast to West Coast and back and forth again, for a job, for a friend, for a change, for a kick.
Whatever is language is poetic language and if the word required by the poet does not exist in his known language then it is up to him to discover it.
You are a story worthy of being told, A person made to be loved, With a life meant to be lived.
If you read every poem in every anthology of Greek poetry, you wouldn't read one poem in which a character of the woman who's loved is described or matters.
You might as well answer the door, my child, the truth is furiously knocking.
