I write poetry on my iPhone. I’ve got about 100 poems on there.
The reason a poet is a poet is to write poems, not to advertise himself as a poet.
Poems and songs penned as an unstoppable outpouring of the heart take on a life of their own. They transcend the limits of nationality and time as they pass from person to person, from one heart to another.
I’ve had journals ever since I was really little. Sometimes I write poems and stuff, but for the most part I write down what happens to me during the day that I don’t want to forget. So I have books filled with little things like that.
If I weren’t musical, then I would have just published a book, you know? But I’m lucky enough to play piano, and so I use piano to convert my poems.
I work very hard on all my poems, but most of the work consists of trying not to sound as if I had worked. I try to make them sound as natural as possible, but within a quite strict form, which to my ears has a lot to do with musical rhythm and sound.
Early on, if I was alone two three nights in a row, I’d start writing poems about suicide.
It seems like I’ve been writing since birth! I started writing poems before I got to school. I wrote the class musical in first grade – both words and music. It was about a bunch of vegetables who got together in a salad. I played the chief carrot!
Ideally, I’d love to write poems that intrigued humans across the board: literary folk and academics as well as… dog-walkers, doctors, plumbers, chefs, math professors, jugglers, etc.
When I was a kid, a pickleball hit me in the back of the head, and I had memory problems. I was in a boarding school and the nuns gave me poems to remember to try and get the memory going again.
I started writing after the death of my grandfather – memories, poems, etc. It was very personal; for years I did not share my writing with anyone.
I want to write poems which are very emotional, but I would have some hesitation in saying I want to write poems which are sentimental.
I used to carry about with me a German map-case filled with poems.
I got $30 from Nation magazine for a poem and $500 for my first book of poems.
I have hundreds of poems memorized. Mostly by others, but also my own. I use the poems when I lead retreats for management groups on topics like creating teams, or coming up with a more entrepreneurial system, or creating more excitement.
The notes I have made are not a diary in the ordinary sense, but partly lengthy records of my spiritual experiences, and partly poems in prose.
The reason one writes poems is so that your poem will be remembered.
The best poems come from the world, go through the poet, and go back in to the world.
Starting after 60, I thought, ‘I’m not going to be able to write a book of poems on the 70s. It’s going to be all moans and groans and complaints, and what is there to laugh about?’ But I found plenty to laugh about.
I like Beethoven, especially the poems.
I booked my first studio at like 12 or 13. Somewhere in that season of my life, singing along with the radio became me wanting to be on radio, you know. And writing Langston Hughes replica poems became me wanting to write like Stevie Wonder.
The idea is to take the most ordinary things and make them extraordinary, as Gerard Manley Hopkins does in his poems.
The Christopher Robin who appears in so many of the poems is not always me. This was where my name, so totally useless to me personally, came into its own: it was a wonderful name for writing poetry round.
A lot of my poems either have historical sequences or other kinds of chronological grids where I’m locating myself in time. I like to feel oriented, and I like to orient the reader at the beginning of a poem.
No poems can please for long or live that are written by water drinkers.
I consider all women as mother. I compose poems for any female considering her as mother.
I’ve always wanted to write poems and nothing else.
Well, the great thing for me about poetry is that in good poems the dislocation of words, that is to say, the distance between what they say they’re saying and what they are actually saying is at its greatest.
I write short phrases and used to think they were poems!
With fiction, I tend to get to my desk and start writing. Poetry I write in my head, often while walking, so that my poems have an organic quality, hopefully.
John Updike’s first published book was a collection of poems.
I would write poems and think up melodies to them later.
Even famous poets such as Marianne Moore and William Carlos Williams were rarely asked to read their poems.
Poems in a way are spells against death. They are milestones, to see where you were then from where you are now. To perpetuate your feelings, to establish them. If you have in any way touched the central heart of mankind’s feelings, you’ll survive.
But you’d have a job to find many of my poems which would seem to be very influenced by a particular person.
I love my funny poems, but I’d rather break your heart. And if I can do both in the same poem, that’s the best.
The headmaster asked to read one of my poems at some celebration or other when I was about 10. When I look back, that is phenomenal encouragement.
I had always written. I had written stories and poems. Then I started writing plays.
I like connecting the abstract to the concrete. There’s a tension in that. I believe the reader or listener should be able to enter the poem as a participant. So I try to get past resolving poems.
Many of my poems are not sexual.
When we used to walk to school, I used to read off the walls, graffiti and stuff, everything. I used to write stories, but I’d never finish them. I wrote poems.
When I was young, I would just write poems into textbooks in class. Everybody needs that outlet. For me, I think it’s less about learning about myself and more about just needing to get things out sometimes.
My own journey in becoming a poet began with memory – with the need to record and hold on to what was being lost. One of my earliest poems, ‘Give and Take,’ was about my Aunt Sugar, how I was losing her to her memory loss.
I was writing notes, but not composing poems. The Hunter began to develop out of this fragmented process.
Well, ‘The Wellspring’ was written from 1983 to 1986. And it had a section in the beginning that was poems that began from others’ experience.
Yes, I do often write poems from the mind, but I hope I don’t ignore feelings and emotions.
To me many short poems read and write like beginnings that simply whet my appetite; I want to get over that.
I’ve often said that all poetry is political. This is because real poems deal with a human response to reality and politics is part of reality, history in the making. Even if a poet writes about sitting in a glass house drinking tea, it reflects politics.
Poems are perfect for something to listen to while you’re walking around because they don’t take very long.
I was in Paris at an English-language bookstore. I picked up a volume of Dickinson’s poetry. I came back to my hotel, read 2,000 of her poems and immediately began composing in my head. I wrote down the melodies even before I got to a piano.
Punk gave you a kind of chutzpah, so even trying to be a writer, I just thought, ‘Well, I’m going to send poems to ‘Radio Times,’ short stories to the ‘Observer,’ just have a go.
Poems mesmerized me, and I felt better when I was writing them, or trying to – more in touch with something deep and dark within myself.
I think maybe short stories operate in some of the same ways that poems do. They frame single or small moments and elevate those. They give you insight into more minor dramas maybe, dramas between smaller groups of people.
If someone is alone reading my poems, I hope it would be like reading someone’s notebook. A record. Of a place, beauty, difficulty. A familiar daily struggle.
In junior high, I was still writing poems and stories. In college, I was a journalism major. When I got out of college, I went to work for an educational publisher, so I was still writing, developing curriculums.
I used to stand on the corner in San Diego with poems sticking out of my hip pocket, asking people if there was a place where I could read poems. The audience is half of the poem.
I like to read a lot of books and poems. Even though poems are short, I enjoy the emotions that come with them.
A lot of my activity in the theatre, and even in writing poems, was a kind of retrospective aggro on the English teacher who wouldn’t allow me to read poetry aloud.
I had been writing poems and stories since I learned to make letters. I had placed poems in a hardcover anthology at the age of 6. And I knew more big words than anyone else in the 10th grade.
You litter poems with too much learning when you’re younger.
Thanks partly to the kind of poets that we now have and partly to funding, there’s been a gigantic shift in the way poetry is perceived… Poems on the Underground, poets in schools, football clubs, zoos.
My brother used to say that I wrote faster than he could read. He wrote two books – of poems – better than all mine put together.
I think my poems immediately come out of the sensuous and emotional experiences I have.
