New poems no longer come to me with their prodigies of metaphor and assonance. Prose endures. I feel the circles grow smaller, and old age is a ceremony of losses, which is, on the whole, preferable to dying at forty-seven or fifty-two.
Listening to music and lyrics and watching movies, I think, uses a lot of the same muscles we use in reading and experiencing poetry – and yet we somehow forget that we have those when it comes to sitting down with a book of poems.
My youngest son becomes an award-winning nature photographer, and I cannot resist writing poems to his pictures. My daughter loves to cook, though I do not. Yet together, we write a cookbook with fairy tales. And now a second.
It all has to do with art – writing, painting, things I’ve done for a long time but just never had enough time to pursue. I have poetry – things that are designed for songs, but they’re always poems first.
How do poems grow? They grow out of your life.
Of course the other and more serious way in which it all happens is that one finds in poems and language some quality one appropriates for oneself and wishes to reproduce.
Often it seems that there are writers who are their best selves on the page. That Seamus Heaney was as genuine and deeply admirable in person as in his poems was to me a gift, then as now.
Today is the first of August. It is hot, steamy and wet. It is raining. I am tempted to write a poem. But I remember what it said on one rejection slip: ‘After a heavy rainfall, poems titled ‘Rain’ pour in from across the nation.’
Poetry fills clubs, halls and venues. Poets and poems can talk to the deepest feelings and to the silliest. It can be like stand-up or rock music. It can be intimate, it can be pubic.
On that other novels followed: but I still wrote fairy tales and dreamy poems of another world.
I have these rhyme-based ideas because I love Julia Donaldson. ‘The Snail and the Whale’ is one of the most beautiful poems, and I feel like I could do that.
A lot of young poets today, from what I’ve heard and experienced, can’t get their heads past George W. Bush, and I’ve heard so many poems about this democracy and this era of politics that I’m kind of bored by it.
I have been writing songs and poems since I was a little girl. I started writing short scripts, which evolved into the idea for a book.
My childhood was all about going to church, singing in church. And later on, after I got a little older, my mother taught me how to do poems for Easter and Mother’s Day, recitals and so on. I got attached to that, so as I got older and older, I began to recite poetry.
Emily Dickinson has haunted my life – her poems, her persona, all the tales about her solitude. Ever since I discovered her in the seventh grade, I’ve had a crush on that spinster in white, who had such a heroic and startling inner landscape of her own.
I went on all over the States, ranting poems to enthusiastic audiences that, the week before, had been equally enthusiastic about lectures on Railway Development or the Modern Turkish Essay.
A blend of fact and fiction has been used in various forms since the dawn of creative writing, starting with sagas and epic poems.
The best public poems aren’t necessarily those that go at the subject like a bull at a gate.
Though my poems are about evenly split between traditionally formal work that uses rhyme and meter and classical structure, and work that is freer, I feel that the music of language remains at the core of it all. Sound, rhythm, repetition, compression – these elements of my poetry are also elements of my prose.
I went to Princeton to major in comparative literature. I never went to film school, but I studied storytelling across mediums – poems, literature, film, and journalism.
I still read Donne, particularly his love poems.
I tended to write poems about both social and spiritual problems, and some problems one doesn’t really want to solve, and so the problems themselves are solved. You certainly don’t want to solve problems in poems that haven’t been solved in the world.
Imagination makes us aware of limitless possibilities. How many of us haven’t pondered the concept of infinity or imagined the possibility of time travel? In one of her poems, Emily Bronte likens imagination to a constant companion, but I prefer to think of it as a built-in entertainment system.
I was a good student, but a speech impediment was causing problems. One of my teachers decided that I couldn’t pronounce certain words at all. She thought that if I wrote something, I would use words I could pronounce. I began writing little poems. I began to write short stories, too.
My earlier poems were sadder than my poems are today, perhaps because I wrote them in confusion or when I was unhappy. But I am not a melancholy person, quite the contrary, no one enjoys laughing more than I do.
I like poems that are complex.
I am a genius who has written poems that will survive with the best of Shakespeare, Wordsworth and Keats.
In 1977, I wrote a series of poems about a character, Black Bart, a former cattle rustler-turned-alchemist. A good friend, Claude Purdy, who is a stage director, suggested I turn the poems into a play.
My wife, Keisha, came home once, and I had these violinists playing for her, and I’d prepared dinner for her, and I write poems. She’s pretty amazing, so I like to celebrate that. She’s really taught me how to celebrate life; that’s something I’ve learned.
Many poets write books. They’ll tell you: Well, I’ve got my next book, but there are two poems I need to write, one about x, one about y. This is a wonder to me.
The title of the poems was The Only Bar in Dixon. We sent it out to The New Yorker on a fluke, and they took them and printed all three in the same issue.
I love poetry; it’s my primary literary interest, and I suppose the kind of reading you do when you are reading poems – close reading – can carry over into how you read other things.
Love, like poems, knows no boundaries. Religions, race, distance not even age can restrict someone from falling in love.
I think of my poems as personal and public at the same time. You could say they serve as psychological overlays. One fits on top of the other, and hopefully there’s an ongoing evolution of clarity.
I have learned so much from working with other poets, travelling and reading with them, spending days discussing poems in progress. There is the sense that we are all, as writers, part of something which is more powerful than any of us.
‘A collected poems’ is either a gravestone or a testimonial to survival.
I’ve said what I’m prepared to say in my poems, and then journalists think that you’re going to tell them a whole lot more.
Short stories and poems are an intense burst of emotions.
The idea of how to read a poem is based on the idea that poetry needs you as a reader. That the experience of poetry, the meaning in poetry, is a kind of circuit that takes place between a poet, a poem and a reader, and that meaning doesn’t exist or inhere in poems alone.
I’m happy to stick with my persona. There are themes of love lost and love regained, but the main themes of all poems are basically love and death, and that seems to be the message of poetry.
Translations are very important these days, since an average person can only know 2-3 three languages. We have so many languages in India and poems are being written in as many of them.
There’s not too much difference between writing a picture book and writing a collection of a hundred poems or so, except that the bigger books take a lot longer to do.
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.
In the United States, in poetry workshops, it’s now quite a thing to make graduate students learn poems by heart.
In truth, I became a conductor because deep down I wanted to conduct Brahms’s four symphonies and Richard Strauss’s tone poems.
When I went to film school about three years ago, the first two years you’re required to make a series of short films. I started making films based on short poems.
The ‘Iliad’ covered only two months of the great ten-year war with Troy. At least six other epic poems preceded or continued the events in the ‘Iliad’, but they survive only as fragments.
I have to make myself write, sometimes. In the space between poems, you somehow forget how to do it, where to begin. It was good to be task – based for a while. I just came downstairs each day, picked the one I was going to do that day, and wrote.
But I can’t and don’t ever want to write bell-yanking confetti-tossing hat-throwing poems.
My father read poetry to me, encouraged me to memorize poems. But the writing of it was quite a different thing.
It used to be that one poet in each generation performed poems in public. In the twenties, it was Vachel Lindsay, who sometimes dropped to his knees in the middle of a poem. Then Robert Frost took over, and made his living largely on the road.
I do think that all of us think in poems.
We all write poems; it is simply that poets are the ones who write in words.
I want to just go to places where writers don’t usually go, where people like me don’t usually show up, and say, ‘Here are some poems. Do they speak to you? What do you hear in them?’
