Quotes of All Topics . Occasions . Authors
After the last line of a poem, nothing follows except literary criticism.
I want the poem to be an experience - for both the listener and for myself.
Peace goes into the making of a poem as flour goes into the making of bread.
For many years, I thought a poem was a whisper overheard, not an aria heard.
For me, a poem is an opportunity to kind of interrogate myself a little bit.
The box was a universe, a poem, frozen on the boundaries of human experience.
For me a poem has to sing out of itself and the lilt of it carries the magic.
Sometimes you have a poem that you really want to write and it never happens.
It's a big statement if you use the word 'America' in the title of your poem.
I got $30 from Nation magazine for a poem and $500 for my first book of poems.
The poem, for me, is simply the first sound realized in the modality of being.
To approach a poem as if it is a puzzle to be understood is to miss the point.
I believe the poet shouldn't be in the poem at all except as a lens or as ears.
You go to a poem to get the mystery - and sometimes you go to get more confused.
I have never started a poem yet whose end I knew. Writing a poem is discovering.
I've approached every character I've ever played with a poem, first and foremost.
However, if a poem can be reduced to a prose sentence, there can't be much to it.
The function of a book or a poem or a story is to delight, to enchant, to beguile.
To read a poem is to hear it with our eyes; to hear it is to see it with our ears.
A poem need not have a meaning and like most things in nature often does not have.
Considered subjectively, philosophy always begins in the middle, like an epic poem.
A poem can provide testimony. A poem can provide solace. It can provide a connection.
It's always like you write a poem when you can't really say what you're trying to say.
I think that you certainly don't have to be aged and travel the world to write a poem.
The only thing you can really say in a poem is what you really, really deeply believe.
The only real evidence that any critic may bring before his gaze is the finished poem.
There is no time in modern agriculture for a farmer to write a poem or compose a song.
Ginsberg's Collected Poems contains a wonderful poem about making it with Neal Cassady.
A great poem leaves so much room for everybody to have such a different reaction to it.
A so-called happy marriage corresponds to love as a correct poem to an improvised song.
A poem begins as a lump in the throat, a sense of wrong, a homesickness, a lovesickness.
A poem might be defined as thinking about feelings - about human feelings and frailties.
I think of my peace paintings as one long poem, with each painting being a single stanza.
I always say that I'll have a go and see whether the poem works and if it does, then fine.
A poem can have an impact, but you can't expect an audience to understand all the nuances.
This creature of the poem may assemble itself into a being with its own centrifugal force.
Fred Moten is a poet I really love because he changes who is telling the poem all the time.
I know the sag of the unfinished poem. And I know the release of the poem that is finished.
What is the poem, after it is written? That is the question. Not where it came from or why.
We live in such a digital age. Paper is going out of our lives. A poem on paper is tangible.
If you know what you are going to write when you're writing a poem, it's going to be average.
I find that my reading, particularly nonfiction, can inspire a poem as well as anything else.
I don't think there's anything wrong with someone having to read a poem twice. Or even a book.
It's when you begin to lie to yourself in a poem in order to simply make a poem, that you fail.
A poem, once it's written, is meant to be read with the inner voice of the person who reads it.
My secret dream is to write an epic poem. That's probably the most pretentious thing I've said.
If you laughed earlier in the poem, and I bring you close to tears in the end, that's the best.
I do read a poem almost every morning. Unless I'm really, really late, I have to get my poem in.
I don't see that a single line can constitute a stanza, although it can constitute a whole poem.
One who writes a poem writes it because the language prompts, or simply dictates, the next line.