I usually write for the individual reader -though I would like to have many such readers. There are some poets who write for people assembled in big rooms, so they can live through something collectively. I prefer my reader to take my poem and have a...
I started classical and operatic lessons when I was 8 and become an operatic singer and went to competition. I write my own music. A lot of the songs, growing up, I was into writing dark stories and poems, and one day I started putting melodies to th...
Jakob Elinsky: [about the poem] To his coy mistress. Mary D'Annunzio: Well, it's not real deep or anything. The guy wants to get laid and he's telling her to give it up.
The pure playfulness of certain wholly whimsical portions of (Charles) Cros’s work should not obscure the fact that at the center of some of his most beautiful poems a revolver is leveled straight at us.
Like so many aspiring writers who still have boxes of things they've written in their parents' houses, I filled notebooks with half-finished poems and stories and first paragraphs of novels that never got written.
The act of song writing and recording became one and the same to me; because I essentially recorded everything I did from the day I began trying to write songs. I've always had a lot to say. I'd always written poems.
A revolutionary poem will not tell you who or when to kill, what and when to burn, or even how to theorize. It reminds you... where and when and how you are living and might live, it is a wick of desire.
Twitter was like a poem. It was rich, real and spontaneous. It really fit my style. In a year and a half, I tweeted 60,000 tweets, over 100,000 words. I spent a minimum eight hours a day on it, sometimes 24 hours.
I started writing as a child. But I didn't think of myself actually writing until I was in college. And I had gone to Africa as a sophomore or something - no, maybe junior - and wrote a book of poems. And that was my beginning. I published that book.
I was miserable, of course, for I was seventeen, and so I swung into action and wrote a poem, and it was miserable, for that's how I thought poetry worked: you digested experience and shat literature. [from "Mingus at the Showplace"]
The interesting thing is that you don't often meet a poet who doesn't have a sense of humour, and some of them do keep it out of their poems because they're afraid of being seen as light versifiers.
I always tell students that writing a poem and publishing it are two quite separate things, and you should write what you have to write, and if you're afraid it's going to upset someone, don't publish it.
Here the frailest leaves of me and yet my strongest lasting, Here I shade and hide my thoughts, I myself do not expose them, And yet they expose me more than all my other poems
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...
How many loved your moments of glad grace, And loved your beauty with love false or true; But one man loved the pilgrim soul in you, And loved the sorrows of your changing face.
What I saw was just one eye In the dawn as I was going: A bird can carry all the sky In that little button glowing. Never in my life I went So deep into the firmament.
Stranger, pause and look; From the dust of ages Lift this little book, Turn the tattered pages, Read me, do not let me die! Search the fading letters finding Steadfast in the broken binding All that once was I!
O chestnut-tree, great-rooted blossomer, Are you the leaf, the blossom or the bole? O body swayed to music, O brightening glance, How can we know the dancer from the dance?
I find now, swallowing one teaspoon of pain, that it drops downward to the past where it mixes with last year’s cupful and downward into a decade’s quart and downward into a lifetime’s ocean. I alternate treading water and deadman’s float.
A charm invests a face Imperfectly beheld,— The lady dare not lift her veil For fear it be dispelled. But peers beyond her mesh, And wishes, and denies,— Lest interview annul a want That image satisfies.
I freeze and burn, love is bitter and sweet, my sighs are tempests and my tears are floods, I am in ecstasy and agony, I am possessed by memories of her and I am in exile from myself.
