I always say that I’ll have a go and see whether the poem works and if it does, then fine.
When I write a poem, I go into a state of self-forgetfulness, and something higher takes over; I like to call it my best self.
If that voice that you created that is most alive in the poem isn’t carried throughout the whole poem, then I destroy where it’s not there, and I reconstruct it so that that voice is the dominant voice in the poem.
Listeners are kind of ambushed… if a poem just happens to be said when they’re listening to the radio. The listener doesn’t have time to deploy what I call their ‘poetry deflector shields’ that were installed in high school – there’s little time to resist the poem.
I keep the drafts of each poem in color-coded folders. I pick up the folders according to how I feel about that color that day.
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.
When I was 18 years old I went to Shakespeare Company, the school, and I wrote a poem about my leaves – I felt like a tree that had no leaves. That is the life at 18.
The most important tribute any human being can pay to a poem or a piece of prose he or she really loves is to learn it by heart. Not by brain, by heart; the expression is vital.
I read a poem every night, as others read a prayer.
I did that Grammys thing – I did a little freeform poem.
Writing can sometimes be exploitative. I like to take a few steps of remove in order to respect the privacy of the subject. If readers make the link, they have engaged with the poem.
Every day we should hear at least one little song, read one good poem, see one exquisite picture, and, if possible, speak a few sensible words.
I always tell students that writing a poem and publishing it are two quite separate things, and you should write what you have to write, and if you’re afraid it’s going to upset someone, don’t publish it.
I can’t know entirely what’s at stake beforehand; you find out as you go. I love to take a poem, for instance, that starts with something seemingly frivolous or inconsequential and then grows in gravity until by the end it’s something very serious.
I need scarcely observe that a poem deserves its title only inasmuch as it excites, by elevating the soul. The value of the poem is in the ratio of this elevating excitement.
I think if I tried very hard, I could do a novel or a play, a poem. I could possibly paint a picture, but I know I can’t write music. And still, it is the most accessible of all arts, as you know when you hear a tune.
When I write a poem, I do not have to worry about using a higher Urdu vocabulary because I know the reader knows Urdu well.
A poem is true if it hangs together. Information points to something else. A poem points to nothing but itself.
My sense of a poem – my notion of how you revise – is: you get yourself into a state where what you are intensely conscious of is not why you wrote it or how you wrote it, but what you wrote.
I think you can have the greatest lyrics in the world and if it doesn’t have the best tune in the world it will suck. I mean if the music wasn’t important it would just be a poem.
Of course a poem is a two-way street. No poem is any good if it doesn’t suggest to the reader things from his own mind and recollection that he will read into it, and will add to what the poet has suggested. But I do think poetry readings are very important.
Poetry was one of the things that interested me most as I was growing up. I used to write it in my head all the time. I still think the very greatest pleasure in life is to write a poem.
Poe’s saying that a long poem is a sequence of short ones is perfectly just.
I’ve been writing since I was sixteen. At first, I wrote mostly short stories and poetry. The first thing I ever had published was a poem about a football game. It was printed in my local newspaper.
I make a discovery in a poem as I write it.
A novel takes place over time. It’s a historical narrative, and it needs to have a series of peaks and valleys and the move through. You can’t just start at the highest pitch and stay there, but you can in a lyric poem.
The beautiful feeling after writing a poem is on the whole better even than after sex, and that’s saying a lot.
Is there any purpose to translating poetry? A poem does not contain information of importance, like a signpost or a warning notice.
Poetry is the experience of liberty. The poet risks himself, chances all on the poem’s all with each verse he writes.
The experiment of poetry, as far as I am concerned, happens when the poem carries you beyond where you could have reasonably expected to go.
A dark poem is meant to redeem the dark part.
If you read quickly to get through a poem to what it means, you have missed the body of the poem.
You don’t make a poem with ideas, but with words.
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!
Most students of literature can pick apart a metaphor or spot an ethnic stereotype, but not many of them can say things like: ‘The poem’s sardonic tone is curiously at odds with its plodding syntax.’
In my relationship with a young guy I was going with in a band – his name was Sylvester, and I think he had another little girl on the side – I told him, ‘If you lose me, you’re going to lose a good thing.’ And I went home and put that poem to music.
It’s like trying to be a traffic cop and write a poem at the same time. You need an executive head to handle all the vast paraphernalia of moviemaking. You need another, more sensitive head to get the delicate human emotional values you are trying to put on film.
Poems, for me, begin as a social engagement. I want to establish a kind of sociability or even hospitality at the beginning of a poem. The title and the first few lines are a kind of welcome mat where I am inviting the reader inside.
The composition of a single melody is born out of a bit of text, perhaps the first line, but it can also be the entire strophe; it can even be the poem’s overall form.
In anything you write – in a short story, a poem – there has to be a counter-motion; it can’t go all in one direction.
A so-called happy marriage corresponds to love as a correct poem to an improvised song.
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.
Usually a life turned into a poem is misrepresented.
A poem can provide testimony. A poem can provide solace. It can provide a connection.
If I wrote in a sonnet form, I would be distorting. Or if I had some great new idea for line breaks and I used it in a poem, but it’s really not right for that poem, but I wanted it, that would be distorting.
The experiment of the poem is mostly intuitive. I write the first draft, pulling in the various elements that interest me, in the hope that their being combined will lead to some kind of insight.
Working alone on a poem, a poet is of all artists the most free. The poem can be written with a modicum of technology, and can be published, in most cases, quite cheaply.
As an actor, I come to set, and I have already broken the character down by writing a poem about the character. I try to write in his voice, the way he would write it.
With me it’s the whole thing, it’s the conceit, the idea, what the poem is saying. And it goes on just as long as is necessary to say what needs to be said.
Whether you listen to a piece of music, or a poem, or look at a picture or a jug, or a piece of sculpture, what matters about it is not what it has in common with others of its kind, but what is singularly its own.
America is a poem in our eyes; its ample geography dazzles the imagination, and it will not wait long for metres.
Like the sand and the oyster, it’s a creative irritant. In each poem, I’m trying to reveal a truth, so it can’t have a fictional beginning.
To approach a poem as if it is a puzzle to be understood is to miss the point.
A poem is never finished, only abandoned.
An experienced reader uses the poem as an agent of inquiry. This makes poetry very exciting, unstable, and interactive.
Poetry for me is very easy. It’s like a lightning bolt. I feel this calling, and the first line of the poem comes into my head, and I just have to go to the page, to the typewriter, to the computer or whatever and write it.
My father’s favorite poem was probably ‘Love is patient, love is kind.’ It’s simply stated but pretty profound. That’s how my dad wrote.
I sometimes talk about the making of a poem within the poem.
I published my first poem in ‘The Paris Review’ in 1980.
For me, the power of the poetry in ‘Milk and Honey’ is the feeling you get after finished reading the poem. It’s the emotion you feel once you’ve read the last word, and that is only possible when the diction is easy, and you don’t get stuck on every other word, you don’t know what the word means.
‘Alphabet’ by the late Danish poet Inger Christensen. It’s a book-length abecedarian poem. It’s an activist text but also a portal to wonder.
