Like so many aspiring writers who still have boxes of things they’ve written in their parents’ houses, I filled notebooks with half-finished poems and stories and first paragraphs of novels that never got written.
If you read Keats’s poems, they’re often full of doubts and anxieties. They can be quite tough.
Of the individual poems, some are more lyric and some are more descriptive or narrative. Each poem is fixed in a moment. All those moments written or read together take on the movement and architecture of a narrative.
Favorite poems are like favorite children. We definitely have them but we never tell as the others would have their feelings hurt.
I started out in graduate school to be a fiction writer. I thought I wanted to write short stories. I started writing poems at that point only because a friend of mine dared me to write a poem. And I took the dare because I was convinced that I couldn’t write a good poem… And then it actually wasn’t so bad.
There are a lot of poems where I am questing for God. I don’t think there is any finding of God.
I learned to play guitar at a young age and converted poems and stuff that I had written to songs.
I seem to keep returning to my father in poems because his personality was so extreme, so driven. He did everything to excess.
Poems – crystallizations of the universal play of analogy, transparent objects which, as they reproduce the mechanism and the rotary motion of analogy, are waterspouts of new analogies.
I believed in fictional characters as if they were a part of real life. Poetry was important, too. My parents had memorized poems from their days attending school in New York City and loved reciting them. We all enjoyed listening to these poems and to music as well.
My first book was an adult novel, ‘Down Among the Gods,’ published by Virago, and I’ve written poems as well, a slim volume of poetry.
Rhyme is a mnemonic device, an aid to the memory. And some poems are themselves mnemonics, that is to say, the whole purpose of the poem is to enable us to remember some information.
People have been writing songs and poems since the time we had brains.
The Black Mountain poet I like most is the early Creeley. Those early poems seem very lyrical and very traditional, with a lot of voice and character.
I’m trying to make the poems as musical as I can – from the inception. So that whether they’re read on the page, or people read them aloud, or I read them aloud, the musicality will be kind of a given.
And Robert Lowell, of course – in his poems, we’re not located in his actual life. We’re located more in the externals, in the journalistic facts of his life.
The way a small child might dream of visiting Disneyland, I dreamed of writing books. Never did I think my poems would become that.
I have always loved writing and I used to pen down my thoughts, little stories and poems growing up.
I’ve got some incredible fans actually – so loyal and they make me birthday cards and Christmas cards. I got this package of poems and artwork based around the songs. They’ve got this thing called ‘Floetry’ where they all have to put in artwork. They’ve set up their own competitions and stuff which is kind of amazing.
People called me Cilla when I was little because I was always singing and writing poems.
It’s difficult to learn poems off by heart that don’t rhyme.
It’s hard to write haiku. I write long, silly Indian poems.
The years rolled their brutal course down the hill of time. Still poor, my clothes still smelling of the horse barn, still writing those doubtful poems where too much emotion clashed with too many words.
The act of song writing and recording became one and the same to me; because I essentially recorded everything I did from the day I began trying to write songs. I’ve always had a lot to say. I’d always written poems.
My mother is not a woman of ordinary culture. She knows literature and speaks Spanish better than I do. She even corrected my poems and gave me advice when I was studying rhetoric.
I was unnerved to learn in my twenties that the poems of Emily Dickinson that I had memorized as a girl were not the poems as she had written them.
Indeed, I would venture to guess that Anon, who wrote so many poems without signing them, was often a woman.
I think poems belong as much in the news pages as the literary pages. A lot of people throw aside the literary pages! Whereas everybody looks at the news section.
When I was 13, I started writing songs, and it fell into my lap all of a sudden. I wrote poems and journals, but that’s when it switched for me to songwriting. That’s when I wanted to do everything. It was like a fire all of a sudden. I started coming to Nashville and moved here when I was 15.
When American poet Alice Notley was very young, she used to sit in front of the radio and just listen. When she got older, she began to hear words and songs in her head everywhere she went – songs she loved, like ‘Begin the Beguine’ by Cole Porter, and her own words that sometimes tumbled out into poems.
Everybody has ideas. The vital question is, what do you do with them? My rock musician sons shape their ideas into music. My sister takes her ideas and fashions them into poems. My brother uses his ideas to help him understand science. I take my ideas and turn them into stories.
On July 26, 1916, I announced to all my friends in America that from now on I resolved to write no more poems in the classical language, and to begin my experiments in writing poetry in the so-called vulgar tongue of the people.
Sometimes I write quickly, sometimes I spend several weeks on a single poem. I would really love for readers not to be able to guess which of the poems took so much work!
We tend to put poems into factions. And it restricts our reading.
Many of my poems try to use a comic element to reach a place that isn’t comic at all. The comic element works as a surprise. It is unexpected and energizing.
For me, it makes sense to address shocking experiences through poems because of the way poems also have that effect on the reader.
The ancient Greek oral poets all had this anxiety about the deficiencies of their memories and always began poems by praying to the Muse to help them remember.
Sometimes poetry is inspired by the conversation entered into by reading other poems.
Heartbreak was the impetus to me writing poems and music in the first place. Over the years, I had my heart broken so badly that if I didn’t find a way to get all the pain out, I was going to lose my mind. I was crazy! Like, wanting to slash tires and smash car windows. Crazy! I was so hurt that I had to write.
All that I’ve done in my life thus far, all the poems and all the pictures, are not so much an intermingling of my life with art but a divine accident.
My earliest poems sing of the absolute necessity of allowing love to invade and pervade one’s life. That can make the miracle happen in reality. Try it.
When I make a film, I don’t watch a lot of other films. I read a lot; I try to read poems, things that can liberate my human condition, that make me go away… I spend a lot of the time doing nothing, just concentrating on the subject. Sometimes I’ll sit in my chair for two or three hours without doing anything.
I can’t understand these chaps who go round American universities explaining how they write poems: It’s like going round explaining how you sleep with your wife.
The poets who have written the best poems about war seem to be the poets whose countries have experienced an invasion or vicious dictatorships.
During the Gulf War, I remember two little third grade girls saying to me – after I read them some poems by writers in Iraq – ‘You know, we never thought about there being children in Iraq before.’ And I thought, ‘Well those poems did their job, because now they’ll think about everything a little bit differently.’
I also write poems, so that is something that I really enjoy.
That sense of mystery, but also of revelation, is what I turn to poems for. They’re able to embody experience. We need more and more of that.
I have written symphonic poems and chamber music. It is my way of personal expression.
When you put a book together and arrange it, there’s a lot of anxiety and turmoil about what order the poems should be in.
In our period, they say there is free speech. They say there is no penalty for poets, There is no penalty for writing poems. They say this. This is the penalty.
I always wrote poems when I was a little girl, and I loved hip hop music, and I kind of just started writing poems over beats, and that’s when I started rapping.
I have a vast ‘bone pile’ of stillborn or abandoned poems along with jottings and wisps from the great beyond that I tend to scan. Sometimes that leads somewhere, and sometimes the Muse is just on sabbatical.
Why does one always ask a writer why they stopped? I am sure everyone finds in any drawer a few dear poems.
Writing wasn’t just a form of expression. It was a form of pathology by embarking on spoken word over and over and over again and reciting my poems.
I believe in rooting poems in actual places, even if you move into some other extraordinary realm.
I don’t write poems. I don’t give flowers to girls… yet.
I think poems return us to that place of mud and dirt and earth, sun and rain.
