Quotes of All Topics . Occasions . Authors
Mostly the thought and the verse come inseparably. In my poem Poetics, it's as close as I come to telling how I do it.
For me, a paragraph in a novel is a bit like a line in a poem. It has its own shape, its own music, its own integrity.
In anything you write - in a short story, a poem - there has to be a counter-motion; it can't go all in one direction.
My favourite poem is called 'Roots and Wings' - it's a very moving poem about how if you've got real roots you can fly.
The first poem I ever wrote, about loss, when I was 5 years old, expressed the themes of everything I would ever write.
An experienced reader uses the poem as an agent of inquiry. This makes poetry very exciting, unstable, and interactive.
Do not wait for a poem; a poem is too fast for you. Do not wait for the poem; run with the poem and then write the poem.
There's a crystallization that goes on in a poem which the young man can bring off, but which the middle-aged man can't.
I've never read a political poem that's accomplished anything. Poetry makes things happen, but rarely what the poet wants.
To a poet the mere making of a poem can seem to solve the problem of truth, but only a problem of art is solved in poetry.
When I write a poem, I do not have to worry about using a higher Urdu vocabulary because I know the reader knows Urdu well.
In many ways, I feel like the form carries so much of the weight in a poem, obviously. But I think we sometimes forget that.
Sometimes a poem should just be about a girl jumping rope. It doesn't have to be something that is imbued with more despair.
Poetry, whatever the manifest content of the poem, is always a violation of the rationalism and morality of bourgeois society.
I have a high guilt quotient. A poem can go through as many as 50 or 60 drafts. It can take from a day to two years-or longer.
When I write a poem, I go into a state of self-forgetfulness, and something higher takes over; I like to call it my best self.
I keep the drafts of each poem in color-coded folders. I pick up the folders according to how I feel about that color that day.
Arranging a bowl of flowers in the morning can give a sense of quiet in a crowded day - like writing a poem or saying a prayer.
Each poem in becoming generates the laws by which it is generated: extensions of the laws to other poems never completely take.
Learn poetry by heart. If you know a poem by heart, no one can take it away from you, and you can take advantage of it anytime.
I see my work behind the camera as the actualization of a poem. I like to linger on images, conveying things through stillness.
I can write a poem in 10 minutes. I like writing songs; I can write songs in 5 or 10 minutes. My concentration seems very short.
In working on a poem, I love to revise. Lots of younger poets don't enjoy this, but in the process of revision I discover things.
No poem, not even Shakespeare or Milton or Chaucer, is ever strong enough to totally exclude every crucial precursor text or poem.
What we call a poem is mostly what is not there on the page. The strength of any poem is the poems that it has managed to exclude.
A poem records emotions and moods that lie beyond normal language, that can only be patched together and hinted at metaphorically.
Is there any purpose to translating poetry? A poem does not contain information of importance, like a signpost or a warning notice.
Whether it's a poem I'm working on or a picture I've snapped, it all has to do with the curiosity I feel without thinking about it.
Weaknesses have a certain function in a poem... some strategy in order to pave the reader's way to the impact of this or that line.
A poem generated by its own laws may be unrealized and bad in terms of so-called objective principles of taste, judgement, deduction.
A writer's work often reflects what he or she has been exposed to in life; experiences which are the groundwork of a poem or a story.
I don't know whether a poem has be there to help to develop something. I think it's there for itself, for what the reader finds in it.
No good poem, however confessional it may be, is just a self-expression. Who on earth would claim that the pearl expresses the oyster?
I find in my own writing that only fiction - and rarely, a poem - fully tests me to the kind of limits of what I know and what I feel.
My works really begin in a very simple way. Sometimes it's an image, and sometimes it's words I might write, like a fragment of a poem.
Verse is not written, it is bled; Out of the poet's abstract head. Words drip the poem on the page; Out of his grief, delight and rage.
My best days do seem like a distillation of all that was best about school. Write a story! Paint a picture! Write a poem! Make a print!
Robert Frost had always said you mustn't think of the last line first, or it's only a fake poem, not a real one. I'm inclined to agree.
My father's favorite poem was probably 'Love is patient, love is kind.' It's simply stated but pretty profound. That's how my dad wrote.
The poem is the literary form of the 21st century. It's able to connect young people in a deep way to language... it's language as play.
The poem that became the song 'Gold All Over the Ground' was written during 1967, when my dad was really falling in love with my mother.
One day, I just got up to read a poem and started singing. I looked around - the reaction was great. And I said, 'Oh, boy. I like this.'
Your response to literature is to do with maturity; if you don't respond to a book or a poem when you are 12, you might when you are 13.
I write some country music. There's a song called 'I Hope You Dance.' Incredible. I was going to write that poem; somebody beat me to it.
You will enjoy the TV and radio forecast much more if you stop taking it as advice and simply treat it as a short poem about the weather.
If a poem is each time new, then it is necessarily an act of discovery, a chance taken, a chance that may lead to fulfillment or disaster.
In a poem the excitement has to maintain itself. I am governed by the pull of the sentence as the pull of a fabric is governed by gravity.
What is it precisely, that feeling of 'returning' from a poem? Something is lighter, softer, larger - then it fades, but never completely.
Like the sand and the oyster, it's a creative irritant. In each poem, I'm trying to reveal a truth, so it can't have a fictional beginning.
The first time I ever got up on a stage, I did a comedy poem. I don't know how I got there in the first place because I was very, very shy.