Quotes of All Topics . Occasions . Authors
I'm so happy to be an advocate for poetry.
Fresh or changing conditions ferment fresh forms.
It's absolutely crucial to maintain my life as a poet.
Poetry is a vocation. It is not a career but a calling.
A poem is a hand, a hook, a prayer. It is a soul in action.
Depression is a feeling without a cause. Mourning has a cause.
I like the machinery of poems, especially when they have human warmth.
Poetry itself hasn't been well served by poets who fled to the margins.
Poets have always celebrated grief as one of the deepest human emotions.
I think fiction goes to poetry for the intensity of its use of language.
There has never been a great poet who wasn't also a great reader of poetry.
A certain kind of poetry looks back at experience from an older perspective.
The sense of flowing, which is so crucial to song, is also crucial to poetry.
I don't think you can read poetry while you're watching television very well.
Poetry takes place in time. It is a durational. Things take place in sequence.
You are always trying to make something that is more than the sum of its parts.
I think it's one of the things that drive lyric poetry, our sense of mortality.
The poets needed to learn to pay greater attention to character and to narrative.
I still feel that I'm capable of being as emotionally present as when I was young.
I didn't sit down then and start writing poems, but it was in the back of my mind.
I did not know the work of mourning Is a labor in the dark We carry inside ourselves
Now, the process of writing poetry is very messy. Not systematic, never quite the same
The Portuguese and Galician term 'saudade' suggests a profoundly bittersweet nostalgia.
I started writing poetry as a teenager in suburban Chicago out of emotional desperation.
Each book should be an entity unto itself, with its own structure, character, life, name.
I come from Chicago, and the landscape of the Midwest has always meant a great deal to me.
Poetry takes courage because you have to face things and you try to articulate how you feel.
Works of art imitate and provoke other works of art, the process is the source of art itself.
The poet wants justice. And the poet wants art. In poetry we can't have one without the other.
I wish I wrote drafts and then revised them, but I don't. What I do is I seem to revise as I go.
I believe in rooting poems in actual places, even if you move into some other extraordinary realm.
It's very important to me to be an American poet, a Jewish poet, a poet who came of age in the 1960s.
Reading poetry is an adventure in renewal, a creative act, a perpetual beginning, a rebirth of wonder.
I think the culture can absorb so many people writing poetry and trying to earn their living in poetry.
My cultural experiences were as important to my formation as many of the other things that happened to me.
I don't think poetry will die, but I think that poetry does demand a certain kind of attention to language.
A person who's only suffering can't write a poem. There are choices to be made, and you need to be objective.
First of all I think that poetry is very noble and I always have with me the sense of the nobility of poetry.
I need to live like that crooked tree--... that knelt down in the hardest winds but could not be blasted away.
I found a comfort in trying to solve some poetic problems because there were human ones I just couldn't solve.
The very good thing about MFA programs is their democratizing. They bring a lot of different people to the table.
I am a tiny seashell that has secretly drifted ashore and carries the sound of the ocean surging through its body.
And when I'm writing well and when I'm inside the feeling, then I can do fairly complicated things with some fluency.
Writing poetry is such an intense experience that it helps to start the process in a casual or wayward frame of mind.
Gertrude Stein said, "I write for myself and strangers." I would say I write for myself, strangers and the great dead.
I began to imitate what I was reading, and I started to become a poet, even though what I was writing were not good poems.
I think it's true that that's something that poetry can go to school on fiction. I think poetry can go to fiction to learn.
I think that's a connection that you can only hope for. It's not something that you can make because it needs someone else.
I aspire to a poetry of great formal integrity, deep passion and high intellect, and I have many models for how to do that.
As soon as something happens to us in America, everyone begins talking about healing. But before you heal, you have to mourn.