Thank God I am not God! Thank God I am not God!
If a poem is each time new, then it is necessarily an act of discovery, a chance taken, a chance that may lead to fulfillment or disaster.
There's so much to think about when you're becoming an adult, and there's so many great poems about that apprehension and excitement.
Lyrics are very different. There is a clear line between that and a poem. Something that has been a source of great excitement and delight for me is this idea that I get to rhyme.
When I was 18 years old I went to Shakespeare Company, the school, and I wrote a poem about my leaves - I felt like a tree that had no leaves. That is the life at 18.
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.
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.
To me many short poems read and write like beginnings that simply whet my appetite; I want to get over that.
Poem Words from the heart Breaking, teaching, healing The deepest, purest form of art Feeling
A poem is a naked person....Some people say that I am a poet.
No race can prosper till it learns that there is as much dignity in tilling a field as in writing a poem.
I do not usually revise much, though I often cut, particularly the end or toward the end of a poem.
There's something about the shape that a poem takes in my mind before I write it that has to do with suddenness.
I write small poems— the kind that fit on a postcard… and still can break your heart
It took some time to gather the research and develop it into the storyline, and to finally finish an origin myth poem that I had been working on for twenty years.
Like the sand and the oyster, it's a creative irritant. In each poem, I'm trying to reveal a truth, so it can't have a fictional beginning.
Often people, when they're confronted with a poem, it's like someone who keep saying 'what is the meaning of this? What is the meaning of this?' And that dulls us to the other pleasures poetry offers.
Is there any purpose to translating poetry? A poem does not contain information of importance, like a signpost or a warning notice.
The experiment of poetry, as far as I am concerned, happens when the poem carries you beyond where you could have reasonably expected to go.
Writing can sometimes be exploitative. I like to take a few steps of remove in order to respect the privacy of the subject. If readers make the link, they have engaged with the poem.
I always knew that I was tremendously creative. I recited love poems, I wrote stories and I got excellent grades in every subject, except for maths.
