Even when I was in school, I was doing papers and writing poems; I always had an edge to my delivery. It was never conscious, but it was more so my organic way of thinking about things.
My poems always begin with a metaphor, but my way into the metaphor may be a word, an image, even a sound. And I rarely know the nature of the metaphor when I begin to write, but there is an attentiveness that a writer develops, a sudden alertness that is much like the feel of a fish brushing against a hook.
Writers must… take care of the sensibility that houses the possibility of poems.
There’ll always be working people in my poems because I grew up with them, and I am a poet of memory.
So many poems you go into and come up empty.
I lived on the farm with my parents and grandparents. I had no playmates as a young child, and I was indulged. I helped my grandmother piece quilts, and we made pretty albums, an old-fashioned pastime. We cut poems and pictures out of magazines.
In a long poem or a sequence of poems, you’re trying to formalize your obsessions and give them a shape and a name. The key is to realize if the connections you are making are ones with resonance.
I first came across ‘The Lake Isle of Innisfree’ in college, with other anthologized poems by Yeats.
In 1971, when I was 29, I wrote my first volume of poetry. I am a poet, and I have published four books of my poems.
I was trying to pay the bills with poems, and it was easy to memorize my poems, because I’d be riding my bike in California trying to memorize them before going on stage at a poetry lounge.
Everybody that read one of my poems went off and wrote poetry. They said that about the Velvets, didn’t they? They didn’t sell many records, but everybody that saw them formed a band.
We read Robert Browning’s poetry. Here we needed no guidance from the professor: the poems themselves were enough.
I’ve been writing poems and stories since I was about 13.
I came from a home full of the sounds of my parents performing poems or playing recordings of Robert Graves, WB Yeats and Dylan Thomas.
Poems, novels – these things belong to the nation, to the culture, and the people.
Keats writes better about poems than anybody I’ve ever read. The things that he says about what he wants his own poems to be are the ideals that I share.
It took me 14 years to write poems about Vietnam. I had never thought about writing about it, and in a way I had been systematically writing around it.
Poems have a different music from ordinary language, and every poem has a different kind of music of necessity, and that’s, in a way, the hardest thing about writing poetry is waiting for that music, and sometimes you never know if it’s going to come.
Artists and writers have to deal with the element that makes the real real and the dream real while you are dreaming it. That’s where stories and poems get their power.
I am increasingly attracted to restricting possibility in the poem by inflicting a form upon yourself. Once you impose some formal pattern on yourself, then the poem is pushing back. I think good poems are often the result of that kind of wrestling with the form.
However, I began to submit poems to British magazines, and some were accepted. It was a great moment to see my first poems published. It felt like entering a tradition.
‘Swan,’ by Mary Oliver. Poems and prose. Reading from this book is as if visiting a very wise friend. There is wisdom and welcoming kindness on every page.
People who attack biography choose as their models vulgar and offensive biography. You could equally attack novels or poems by choosing bad poems or novels.
Older boys were allowed to beat younger ones at my 15th-century English boarding school, and every boy had to run a five-mile annual steeplechase through the sludge and rain of an October day, as horses do. We wrote poems in dead languages and recited the Lord’s Prayer in Latin every Sunday night.
I would come to understand there is no poem separable from its source. I began to see that poems are not just an individual florescence. They are also a vast root system growing down into ideas and understandings. Almost unbidden, they tap into the history and evolution of art and language.
The first thing I tried to do in the months after losing my mother was to write a poem. I found myself turning to poetry in the way so many people do – to make sense of losses. And I wrote pretty bad poems about it. But it did feel that the poem was the only place that could hold this grief.
I wrote poems in my corner of the Brooks Street station. I sent them to two editors who rejected them right off. I read those letters of rejection years later and I agreed with those editors.
I came from a very musical family, so I grew up singing karaoke with the family. My family said ‘do this’ and brought me to singing lessons. I had always been writing poems and songs.
I really liked writing rhyming poems and plays.
I have a little tiny Emily Dickinson so big that I carry in my pocket everywhere. And you just read three poems of Emily. She is so brave. She is so strong. She is such a sexy, passionate, little woman. I feel better.
I like the machinery of poems, especially when they have human warmth.
One of my graduate school professors, to whom I started sending poems when I started writing again after a 10-year hiatus, suggested I prepare a book manuscript which he could send to publishers for me.
I think I felt at some point that I couldn’t understand poetry or that it was beyond me or it didn’t speak to my experience. I think that was because I hadn’t yet found the right poems to invite me in.
I studied poetry in college and for a year in an MFA program. As time went on, my poems got more and more complicated. What I was really trying to do was tell stories.
I’ve been an inveterate reader of literary magazines since I was a teenager. There are always discoveries. You’re sitting in your easy chair, reading; you realize you’ve read a story or a group of poems four times, and you know, Yes, I want to go farther with this writer.
Poetry gives us courage and sets us straight with the world. Poems are great companions and friends.
My poems tend to be more celebratory and lyrical, and the novels so far pretty dark. Poetry doesn’t seem to me to be an appropriate tool for exploring that.
Eight years ago, I was drawn into Keats’s world by Andrew Motion’s biography. Soon I was reading back and forth between Keats’s letters and his poems. The letters were fresh, intimate and irreverent, as though he were present and speaking. The Keats spell went very deep for me.
There is some humour in ‘Family Values.’ I don’t want everyone to think it’s not going to make them laugh. But there are quite a lot of poems there that aren’t funny at all.
In all the poems I’ve written I’ve not really engaged in politics, and when I’ve found myself moving in that direction I’ve always stopped myself.
Throughout his career, W.G. Sebald wrote poems that were strikingly similar to his prose. His tone, in both genres, was always understated but possessed of a mournful grandeur.
I always knew that I was tremendously creative. I recited love poems, I wrote stories and I got excellent grades in every subject, except for maths.
To realise belatedly that there are Swahili epic poems which rival their European equivalents for sweep and power has been exciting.
I would venture to guess that Anon, who wrote so many poems without signing them, was often a woman.
Poems that come swiftly are usually the ones that you keep.
I haven’t shifted language. I’m writing in English because I like it. I’m a sucker for the language, but the good old poems I’m still writing in Russian.
You don’t help people in your poems. I’ve been trying to help people all my life – that’s my trouble.
I started writing poems, and when I first tried prose, I wrote bad articles and essays and columns, and I didn’t have a handle on it. I didn’t go to a school that really taught you how to write that stuff.
Ever since I was a kid, I wanted to go to Oberlin and wanted the liberal arts. Obviously I really get intense pleasure out of drawing connections between pieces and poems and literature and ideas.
I do believe that we’ve a responsibility to try to acknowledge the range, both geographic and graphic, of what’s happening in poetry in English. I’m interested in poems that are first-rate. After that, I’m not too concerned if they come from Queens or Queensland.
At high school, instead of the weekly essay, I would write a poem, and the teacher accepted that. The impulse was one of laziness, I’m certain. Poems were shorter than essays.
A risk for a poet-novelist is imbalance: The poems can flatten into prose or lose their intensity of focus; the novels can stall amid lofty writing or literary preciousness and ignore the engine of plot and character.
When somebody’s in love with you, they think it’s amazing you’ve written them a poem, and when they don’t love you anymore, they hate those poems. They wish those poems would go away.
Lamantia is faith building, encouraging poetry in that it abstractly hugs you by finally capturing the inexpressible. It’s an experience similar to relief, reading his poems.
For ‘King Cole’s American Salvage,’ I rode around in the wrecker with a local driver and watched him deal with customers and hook up the cars. I watched the guy who tore apart the cars in the junkyard. I also wrote poems about those guys. I loved hanging around the yard.
