Quotes of All Topics . Occasions . Authors
I think that as long as you have other poets before you and that you can learn from them, then it's always open ended for you.
As a reader you have a task to do, you have something to do. You bring your experience to it. It's not all inherit in the poem.
There's the brilliant audacity of youth that poets strike upon in their earliest work sometimes that they never can hit upon again.
And what I've found over time is that for me to write a poem that I think is worthy that I can live with, two things have to happen.
Now, as I've gotten older I've been able to write more quickly. Sometimes I get in the space of something and I can do a lot in a day.
Throughout his work, Philip Levine's most powerful commitment has been to the failed and lost, the marginal, the unloved, the unwanted.
You're alone with yourself and your own feelings and that gives you deeper access to what you need to get in touch with to write poetry.
Poems mesmerized me, and I felt better when I was writing them, or trying to - more in touch with something deep and dark within myself.
My focus is on the reader and that the poet's job is not to inspire himself or herself. The poet's job is to inspire some future reader.
And when you are entering into poetry, whatever stage you're at, you are participating in something with a very long and noble tradition.
There's always some place to go. You don't need workshops, you don't need friends necessarily, you can be befriended by literature itself.
The elegy does the work of mourning; it allows us to experience mortality. It turns loss into remembrance, and it delivers an inheritance.
I was surprised recently to find a book called "Poetry in Persons" that's coming out about visit to poets to a class that Pearl London gave.
So, it's a continual process of trial and error and then I find things and I throw it out and start again, but I keep writing it over again.
I guess that would have been 1968. I was a freshman in college and I wasn't writing good poems, but I was at least trying to write poems then.
The attention deficit disorder of the culture is very distressing in America now and I think it puts a lot of things at risk, not just poetry.
Once your poems are completed, you send them into the world. You don't write for a coterie of other writers - you write for other human beings.
The way to become a poet is to read poetry and to imitate what you read and to read passionately and widely and in as involved a way as you can.
It's hard to think that say Shakespeare could have written "The Tempest" when he was young. It seems to be reflective work or retrospective work.
I think one of the things that distinguished my work from the beginning when I was in college was my turning towards poetry from other countries.
But, the best times I have found, in my life, are late at night or early in the morning and I think it's because you're outside the social realm.
I'd say people do need some help with poetry because I think poetry just helps takes us to places that Americans aren't always accustomed to going.
Sometimes the title comes to you at the beginning, sometimes it comes at the end. The very best way in my experience is when it comes in the middle.
I put down these memorandums of my affections in honor of tenderness, in honor of all of those who have been conscripted into the brotherhood of loss.
Now, that can be a traditional form or it can be something you're inventing. It can be the development of a metaphor, the working through of a metaphor.
And sometimes you look at the first poems by someone and you go, "They have freshness and a sense of wonder that is never recaptured again by that poet."
The line is a way of framing poetry. All verse is measured by lines. The poetic line immediately announces its difference from everyday speech and prose.
In every culture, in every language, there is expressive play, expressive word play; there's language use to different purposes that we would call poetry.
The spiritual desire for poetry can be overwhelming, so much do I need it to experience and name my own perilous depths and vast spaces, my own well-being.
A stress on the system and I think a painful thing for many young poets who are looking to find a life in poetry that they're not going to be able to find.
think what you hope for is that at different times of your life you're able to write the poetry that reflects the moment that you're in on your own journey.
When poetry separates from song, then the words have to carry all the rhythm themselves; they have to do all the work. They can't rely on the singing voice.
I would keep in mind to a young poet that you are entering into something that is very important, that has always been important in terms of human concerns.
You're shadowed by your own dream, especially as you get older, of trying to create something that will last in poetry. And so, you're working on its behalf.
A great model for this is the way that Dante calls on Virgil at the beginning of 'The Inferno,' 'The Divine Comedy,' to help guide him through the underworld.
I think the deepest thing is that many fiction writers tell stories but are not elegant writers. But, we're not writing journalism when we're making literature.
But, something has to be worked through formally as well as emotionally. Now, when those two things come together I've got something, I think, that I can be proud of.
Rhythm is sound in motion. It is related to the pulse, the heartbeat, the way we breathe. It rises and falls. It takes us into ourselves; it takes us out of ourselves.
As far as I'm concerned, freedom is the most important thing to creativity. You should feel free to write in whatever way, whatever language, feels comfortable to you.
Civil religion gives American culture its direction and defines its fundamental values, but it does not determine the diversified contents of American national culture.
I love the leisurely amplitude, the spaciousness, of taking a walk, of heading somewhere, anywhere, on foot. I love the sheer adventure of it: setting out and taking off.
Someone who's awake in the middle of the night is a soul consciousness when everyone else is asleep, and that creates a feeling of solitude in poetry that I very much like.
James Salter is a consummate storyteller. His manners are precise and elegant; he has a splendid New York accent; he runs his hands through his gray hair and laughs boyishly.
There's been no poet, no great poet in the history of poetry who hasn't also been a great reader of poetry. This is sometimes distressing to my students when I tell them this.
The idea of a poem as a message in a bottle means that it's sent out towards some future reader and the reader who opens that bottle becomes the addressee of the literary text.
The idea of a poem as a message in a bottle means that it's sent out towards some future reader, and the reader who opens that bottle becomes the addressee of the literary text.
In high school I was leafing through an anthology that our teachers had given up and I found a poem, I go, "That's so strange. This poem looks so much like my grandfather's poem."
But, that was the beginning, though I didn't start writing until I was in high school and when I was in high school I really began to write poetry with great energy and enthusiasm.
Our culture has become increasingly intolerant of that acute sorrow, that intense mental anguish and deep remorse which may be defined as grief. We want to medicate such sorrow away.
Language is an impure medium. Speech is public property and words are the soiled products, not of nature, but of society, which circulates and uses them for a thousand different ends.