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.
Paul Rivers: [quoting a poem] The earth turned to bring us closer. It turned on itself and in us, until it finally brought us together in this dream.
[a poem he's worked on 12 years, written on a note pad] Norther Winslow: The grass so green. Skies so blue. Spectre is really great!
Love is not a receiving material, It's a giving material. Like a pen;giving poems, Like a sun and moon;giving hot and cool, Like a person like you;giving love to your love!
Pretty much the day I stopped being laureate, the poems that had been few and far between came back to me, like birds in the evening nesting in a tree.
At each moment, a poem might grow into a totally different shape. It is not so much like working in a garden. It is more as if you remade the garden every day.
I used the word 'prose' in the Trans-Siberian in the early Latin sense of . Poem seemed to me too pretentious, too narrow. Prose is more open, popular.
There is no scientific discoverer, no poet, no painter, no musician, who will not tell you that he found ready made his discovery or poem or picture - that it came to him from outside, and that he did not consciously create it from within.
Another Christmas Poem Blood Christmas, here again. Let us raise a loving cup: Peace on earth, goodwill to men, And make them do the washing-up.
A Poem does not grow by jerks. As trees in Spring produce a new ring of tissue, so does every poet put forth a fresh outlay of stuff at the same season.
I've always felt, with 'The Iliad,' a real frustration that it's read wrong. That it's turned into this public school poem, which I don't think it is. That glamorising of war, and white-limbed, flowing-haired Greek heroes - it's become a cliched, Bri...
Live, you say, in the present; Live only in the present. But I don’t want the present, I want reality; I want things that exist, not time that measures them. What is the present? It’s something relative to the past and the future. It’s a thing ...
que ferais-je sans ce monde que ferais-je sans ce monde sans visage sans questions où être ne dure qu'un instant où chaque instant verse dans le vide dans l'oubli d'avoir été sans cette onde où à la fin corps et ombre ensemble s'engloutissent ...
When I composed those verses I was preoccupied less with music than with an experience—an experience in which that beautiful musical allegory had shown its moral side, had become an awakening and a summons to a life vocation. The imperative form of...
So while I drove my little and planned his fantasy night of how I was going to give Otter the key to my soul (his words, not mine), I silently panicked and wrote lines of bad poetry. Normally, I am quite adept at writing poems and lyrics to songs I'l...
It's morning. The brown scoops of coffee, the wasp-like Coffee grinder, the neighbors still asleep. The gray light as you pour gleaming water-- It seems you've traveled years to get here. Finally you deserve a house. If not deserve It, have it; no on...
The day I became a writer it wasn't the day a whore paid me in sex in exchange for one of my books which happened often and more and more as time went on it wasn't the first time someone actually paid for one of my books which happens less and less a...
It was language I loved, not meaning. I liked poetry better when I wasn't sure what it meant. Eliot has said that the meaning of the poem is provided to keep the mind busy while the poem gets on with its work -- like the bone thrown to the dog by the...
Insofar as craft and poetics in a poem have a politics, I wanted to avoid that brittle enjambed-prose-sentence-lyric verse, where you have standard sentences snapped off and scattered decoratively across the page (which I might go out on a limb and s...
Each poem holds the voice of a moment. Held within, they are contained, damned to silence; released, they fly into the world to find a new heart and a new home within, where they will speak again.
When you are old and gray and full of sleep And nodding by the fire, take down this book, And slowly read, and dream of the soft look Your eyes had once, and of their shadows deep.
