Top 295 Poems Quotes

Poems are endlessly renewable resources. Whatever you bring to them, at whatever stage of life, gets mirrored back, refracted, reread in new ways.

Don’t be too harsh to these poems until they’re typed. I always think typescript lends some sort of certainty: at least, if the things are bad then, they appear to be bad with conviction.

The number of people writing poems is vast, and their reasons for doing so are many, that much can be surmised from the stacks of submissions.

For instance, it’s a little better now than it was two or three years ago, but something like 70% of the poems I receive seem to be written in the present indicative.

I would like to talk about poems like I talk about football.

My poems tend to have rhetorical structures; what I mean by that is they tend to have a beginning, a middle, and an end. There tends to be an opening, as if you were reading the opening chapter of a novel. They sound like I’m initiating something, or I’m making a move.

I like poems where you don’t really know whether to laugh or cry when you read them.

Poems are not read: they are reread. Reread the poem, then read between the lines, then look at it, then watch it, then peek at it: handle it like an object. Contemplate its shadows, angles and dimensions.

The first poems I knew were nursery rhymes, and before I could read them for myself, I had come to love just the words of them, the words alone.

Attempts to put my poems to music have had disastrous results in all cases. And the poem, if it’s written with the ear, already has been set to its own verbal music as it was composed.

My readers at that time were still men of letters; but there had to be other people waiting to read my poems.

Sometimes, for me, lyrics are derived from poems that I’m working on, and they kind of cross back and forth between the two.

When I was one day old, I learned how to read. When I was two days old, I started to write. By the time I was three, I had finished 212 short stories, 38 novels, 730 poems, and one very funny limerick, all before breakfast.

After I’d produced about two dozen pen and ink drawings, one evening I decided that they needed poems to accompany them. I still have no idea where that notion came from, but it took me about two hours to produce verses for these creatures.

Read a lot – poems, prose, stories, newspapers, anything. Read books and poems that you think you will like and some that you think might not be for you. You might be surprised.

Poems are ideally suited, in some ways, to social media because they pack so much meaning into so little language.

But in a lot of ways my poems are very conventional, and it’s no big deal for me to write a poem in either free verse or strict form; modern poets can, and do, do both.

Each word bears its weight, so you have to read my poems quite slowly.

Certainly in my youth there was lots of singing, lots of storytelling, and whenever we went to a party, you had to do a party piece, like sing songs, recite poems, or tell stories. That sort of narrative musical culture was my upbringing.

There have always been hermits: people who want to get away from other humans. Literally, some of the first extant books and poems found in Mesopotamia and China mention people living alone in the woods. It’s this primal fascination that exists across all cultures and all times.

By reason of weird translation, many such sets of instructions read like poems anyhow.

When I go to the shore, I take along the poems of Pablo Neruda. I suppose it’s because the poems are simultaneously lush and ripe and kind of lazy, yet throbbing with life – like summer itself.

No, I don’t know any Emily Dickinson poems!

I play with language a great deal in my poems, and I enjoy that. I try to condense language, that is, I try to express complicated but I hope real emotions as simply as possible. But that doesn’t mean the poems are simple, just that they are as truthful as I can make them.

My poems – I don’t even like the sound of that, in a way. Not that anyone else wrote them. But we know that only people who are really close to us care about our personal experience.

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 think my poems are slightly underrated by the word ‘accessible.’

I think a good story can do as much as a novel; not the exact same thing, of course, but just as much artistically. They’re different beasts, but to tackle an expansive country like the United States, you’re either going to write a big novel, or go in to various points on the map and write stories or poems.

I believe that poems are a score for performance by the reader, and that you become the speaking voice. You don’t read or overhear the voice in the poem – you are the voice in the poem.

My favorite subject was English or creative writing. We did poems and making a magazine, and I did one on celebrities. I called it ‘Celebrity Life Magazine.’ I interviewed my good friend Kaley Cuoco.

The poems were the only thing I wrote that was not for everyone else. Then my editors at Penguin, who were also friends and had seen several of them, aggressively urged me to do a book. Editors can be aggressive, especially after drinks. That’s how ‘Beyond This Dark House’ appeared.

I think of myself as a writer who photographs. Images, for me, can be considered poems, short stories or essays. And I’ve always thought the best place for my photographs was inside books of my own creation.

I don’t think I’ve ever written a poem whose intention was just to be funny. I’ve written poems that start out funny and often shift into something more serious.

I’ve thought of the last line of some poems for years and tried them out, It wouldn’t work because the last line was much too beautiful for the poem.

Memory has always been fundamental for me. In fact, remembering what I had forgotten is the way most of the poems get started.

As a child, I learned hundreds of poems by heart, which I can recite to this day.

I was always writing – whether it’s ideas, poems, whatever – because we spent so much time in the car traveling from city to city.

In terms of smaller changes over time, I think good plays are like poems. Every syllable counts. So I wrestle with word choice, rhythm in final drafts.

The poets, therefore, however much they adorned the gods in their poems, and amplified their exploits with the highest praises, yet very frequently confess that all things are held together and governed by one spirit or mind.

What I wanted to do was use literature and different kinds of stories and poems as a springboard, tapping into the creativity of our teens – I wanted teenagers to come up with their own creative responses to literature – using books themselves as a starting point.

When I first started to write, I was aware of being queer, but I didn’t write about it. Queer poems would probably not have been accepted by the editors I sent them to.

The sole literary presence from my childhood was my grandfather, a Jewish immigrant from Latvia, who eccentrically copied poems into the backs of his books. After he died, when I was 8 years old, my grandmother gave his books away, and his poems were lost.

I wish I’d been better able to resist the sense of obligation to write some of the poems I did. It’s in the nature of commissioned work to be written too much from the side of your mind that knows what it’s doing, which dries up the poetry.

I started out writing poems before I figured to put melodies to them and play the guitar. Somewhere, there’s a book out there on all those early songs and poems. I hope no one ever finds it. I don’t think it’s my finest work.

I started writing poems on a Xanga page. I always loved writing. I also had a Deviant Art page, actually, because my crush had one, too.

My poems… the ones that start out as jokes become these big ponderous things and the ones that start out ponderous devolve into jokes.

I am a guest of the French language. My poems in French are born of my interaction with the French language, which is not the same as that of a French poet.

I’m a great believer in poetry out of the classroom, in public places, on subways, trains, on cocktail napkins. I’d rather have my poems on the subway than around the seminar table at an MFA program.

I would not say I chose to write long poems on a conscious level. The long poem has been a relative constant.

Literary generations come and go, and each generation passeth away and is heard of no more. In the end, simply the making itself – of poems and stories and essays – delivers the only reward a writer can be sure of. And, perhaps, the only one that matters.

If I were to die thinking that I’d written three poems that people might read after me, I would feel that I hadn’t lived in vain. Great poets might expect the whole body of their work, but most of us – well, I would settle for a handful.

You see, the patience of an audience is very short, particularly with a non-entity. You’re an intruder, and you must make them laugh within three or four seconds. My poems fit the requirements, and I’m always thinking up new ones.