I think of my peace paintings as one long poem, with each painting being a single stanza.
To say a poem is absolute is saying nothing, because an ink blot can be absolute. Yet you put into it what you like. So it becomes totally relative.
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.
In working on a poem, I love to revise. Lots of younger poets don’t enjoy this, but in the process of revision I discover things.
At each moment, a poem might grow into a totally different shape. It is not so much like working in a garden. It is more as if you remade the garden every day.
Reading a poem aloud to an audience is gestural as much as precise.
Even though I am the daughter of a poet, and my stepmother is also a poet, growing up, I didn’t think I could understand poetry; I didn’t think that it had any relevance to my life, the feelings that I endured on a day-to-day basis, until I was introduced to the right poem.
Rome was a poem pressed into service as a city.
It really gets on my goat that people keep quoting Dorothea Mackellar’s ‘My Country’ as proof that there is no such thing as climate change. A poem written more than 100 years ago by a homesick 19 year old versus an ever-increasing body of refereed scientific thought… hmm, hard to know which way to jump, really.
In Surojit’s film, ‘Pagol Hawar Bodol Din,’ I am a villager. Victor Banerjee is also part of the film. The uniqueness of ‘PHBD’ is that the whole film is like a poem.
If you’ve ever been to a poetry slam, you know that the highest scoring emotion is self-righteous indignation: how dare you judge me. So in that way, the poem, ‘What Teachers Make,’ is an absolutely formulaic slam poem designed to allow me to get up on my soap box and say, ‘Let me tell you what really makes me angry.’
I write some country music. There’s a song called ‘I Hope You Dance.’ Incredible. I was going to write that poem; somebody beat me to it.
I like to know that when I’m 90 years old, I’m going to be able to look at a song or poem I wrote and say, ‘Wow! I remember I was so crazy about this person,’ or ‘I remember what that day felt like.’
If you know what you are going to write when you’re writing a poem, it’s going to be average.
Attempts to put my poems to music have had disastrous results in all cases. And the poem, if it’s written with the ear, already has been set to its own verbal music as it was composed.
I can’t tear up a poem and be a sound bite for you. Why is that so hard for anyone to understand?
I try not to observe myself in the process of composing a poem because I don’t want to come up with a formula, which I would then be unscrupulous in using.
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.
Wanted: a needle swift enough to sew this poem into a blanket.
To read a poem is to hear it with our eyes; to hear it is to see it with our ears.
What inspires a poem for me is usually a moment.
One of the disadvantages of poetry over popular music is that if you write a pop song, it naturally gets into people’s heads as they listen in the car. You don’t have to memorize a Paul Simon song; it’s just in your head, and you can sing along. With a poem, you have to will yourself to memorize it.
I don’t think writers are sacred, but words are. They deserve respect. If you get the right ones in the right order, you can nudge the world a little or make a poem which children will speak for you when you’re dead.
What is the point of teaching how to analyse a poem or a piece of Shakespeare but not to analyse the Internet?
For Russians, to whom Pushkin’s poem ‘Eugene Onegin’ is sacred text, the ballet’s story and personae are as familiar and filled with meaning as, for instance, ‘Romeo’ and ‘Hamlet’ are for us. Russians know whole stretches of it by heart, the way we know Shakespeare and Italians know Dante.
I don’t know whether a poem has be there to help to develop something. I think it’s there for itself, for what the reader finds in it.
I write to satisfy the story or poem or piece of fascinating research that speaks to me. To rub a sore, to resonate with joy, to answer a question no one else has satisfactorily answered for me.
I think there is a poem out there for everyone, to be an entrance into the poetry and a relationship with it.
It’s a big statement if you use the word ‘America’ in the title of your poem.
Let my life as Poet begin. I want the life of the Poet. I have labored for over twelve years, one thousand pages of prose. Now, I want the easiness of poetry. The brevity of the poem.
A banal poem is never more than a banal poem. A banal or trite lyric, however, can be – with the right vocal cords – brilliantly and shatteringly conveyed.
I got the writing bug in the fourth grade when a poem of mine was published in the school newspaper. Music criticism came a little later, when I was in high school.
If you laughed earlier in the poem, and I bring you close to tears in the end, that’s the best.
The poem ‘What Teachers Make’ is not without its detractors. This one person wrote to me and said: ‘Gee, Mr. Mali. You don’t possibly have a teacher-God complex, do you?’ And that was the first time I’d ever heard of that expression. So, yeah, I’m sure I have a teacher-God complex.
The form of my poem rises out of a past that so overwhelms the present with its worth and vision that I’m at a loss to explain my delusion that there exist any real links between that past and a future worthy of it.
When I first knew that I wanted to rap I was seven years old and I lost the talent show. It was like spoken word or something. My mom made me do it. It was a Langston Hughes poem. The girl that came on after me, she wound up winning. She was a singer.
We hold that the most wonderful and splendid proof of genius is a great poem produced in a civilized age.
The number of people who read a poem is not as important as how the poem affects those who read it.
The idea that a poem was a made thing stayed with me, and I decided then that I wanted to be an artist, not just a diarist. So I put myself through a kind of apprenticeship in writing poetry, and I understood even then that my practice as a poet was deeply related to my reading.
I see my work behind the camera as the actualization of a poem. I like to linger on images, conveying things through stillness.
To a poet the mere making of a poem can seem to solve the problem of truth, but only a problem of art is solved in poetry.
The whole world of publishing is moving to electronic, but when you put a poem on a screen and you increase the type size, the shape of a poem changes.
‘Safe Harbor’ is a state of mind… it’s the place – in reality or metaphor – to which one goes in times of trouble or worry. It can be a friendship, marriage, church, garden, beach, poem, prayer, or song.
It hardly seems worthwhile to point out the shortsightedness of those practitioners who would have us believe that the form of the poem is merely its shape.
A poet’s cultural baggage and erudition can interfere with a poem.
Mostly the thought and the verse come inseparably. In my poem Poetics, it’s as close as I come to telling how I do it.
A poem generated by its own laws may be unrealized and bad in terms of so-called objective principles of taste, judgement, deduction.
What I try to do is to go into a poem – and one writes them, of course, poem by poem – to go into each poem, first of all without having any sense whatsoever of where it’s going to end up.
The most exciting thing is to read a poem out loud for the first time.
There is no time in modern agriculture for a farmer to write a poem or compose a song.
You can’t read to yourself. It’s your inner ear that hears a poem. If you hear a poet read his own work, it becomes very exciting. The melody is a great part of it.
A revolutionary poem will not tell you who or when to kill, what and when to burn, or even how to theorize. It reminds you… where and when and how you are living and might live, it is a wick of desire.
Poems are not read: they are reread. Reread the poem, then read between the lines, then look at it, then watch it, then peek at it: handle it like an object. Contemplate its shadows, angles and dimensions.
Sometimes the only way I know how to work through something is by writing a poem. And sometimes I get to the end of the poem and look back and go, ‘Oh, that’s what this is all about,’ and sometimes I get to the end of the poem and haven’t solved anything, but at least I have a new poem out of it.
In 1952, I recited aloud for the first time, booming in Oxford’s Sheldonian Theatre from a bad poem that had won a prize. I was twenty-three.
When you finish a poem, it clicks shut like the top of a jewel box, but prose is endless. I haven’t experienced an awful lot of clicking shut!
If I were to agree to write the music for your beautiful poem, it would tie your poem up for some years as I have agreements and obligations which I must respect.
