I have a personal little routine that I do in my dressing room just to kind of get myself mentally prepared to go on stage, and part of that is a poem that I read to myself.
Why does one always ask a writer why they stopped? I am sure everyone finds in any drawer a few dear poems.
Verse is not written, it is bled; Out of the poet's abstract head. Words drip the poem on the page; Out of his grief, delight and rage.
A poem generated by its own laws may be unrealized and bad in terms of so-called objective principles of taste, judgement, deduction.
A poem is never a put-up job, so to speak. It begins as a lump in the throat, a sense of wrong, a homesickness, a lovesickness. It is never a thought to begin with.
I can't think of a case where poems changed the world, but what they do is they change people's understanding of what's going on in the world.
be the kiss in my hair that no one sees move, when i move sigh, when i sigh... be that line from a poem that i hold in my eyes.
...few young poets [are] testing their poems against the ear. They're writing for the page, and the page, let me tell you, is a cold bed.
If life is a poem, be the poet. If life is a story, be the author. If life is an adventure, be the hero. To live any other way is a waste of this experience we call life.
You can say a lot more with a poem than you can with a song, but with a song you can really be more powerful with it. You can express it a lot more powerfully.
I try not to observe myself in the process of composing a poem because I don't want to come up with a formula, which I would then be unscrupulous in using.
We can no longer allow them to write just stories and poems; we must teach them the forms of nonfiction writing as well, specifically that of writing on demand.
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.
One hundred copies? Of these poems you do not even like?” asked the Roman. “They’re nasty bits about famous people; everyone will want them.
Trees are poems the earth writes upon the sky, We fell them down and turn them into paper, That we may record our emptiness.
When you finish a poem, it clicks shut like the top of a jewel box, but prose is endless. I haven't experienced an awful lot of clicking shut!
The paintings may communicate even better because people are lazy and they can look at a painting with less effort than they can read a poem.
I don't know whether a poem has be there to help to develop something. I think it's there for itself, for what the reader finds in it.
I’m looking for you in the bare corridor where my shadow is the only passerby harmonizing an unsettling whisper: echoed through my chiming thoughts From the poem 'Looking For You
You might as well ask an artist to explain his art, or ask a poet to explain his poem. It defeats the purpose. The meaning is only clear thorough the search.
Even though I was a reluctant reader in junior high and high school, I found myself writing poems in the back of class.
