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.
And at least in poetry you should feel free to lie. That is, not to lie, but to imagine what you want, to follow the direction of the poem.
In a manner of speaking, the poem is its own knower, neither poet nor reader knowing anything that the poem says apart from the words of the poem.
I deliberately wrote a poem in my last book where I was suggesting that there are other passions as great as or more important than the passion of sex.
Just as a new scientific discovery manifests something that was already latent in the order of nature, and at the same time is logically related to the total structure of the existing science, so the new poem manifests something that was already latent in the order of words.
There’s a crystallization that goes on in a poem which the young man can bring off, but which the middle-aged man can’t.
Strictly speaking, the idea of a scientific poem is probably as nonsensical as that of a poetic science.
I go to the gym, do some martial arts, and I love poetry. I have a tattoo of my family crest, and another on my back that says ‘The Road Not Taken,’ which is a poem by Robert Frost.
The function of a book or a poem or a story is to delight, to enchant, to beguile.
Every single soul is a poem.
A thing may fail as a poem because it tries to do what a poem cannot do: it tries to become a treatise on cosmic truth… We can best be exact about the cosmic things – God and truth, beauty, eternity and love – by not talking directly about them.
One of my favorite passages in ‘Leaves of Grass,’ that breathless, exuberant poem so rich and full of innocence and joy and generosity and compassion, is ‘Mannahatta.’
The paintings may communicate even better because people are lazy and they can look at a painting with less effort than they can read a poem.
Usually a poem takes shape accoustically – a line or a pair of lines will repeat itself in my ear.
That’s kind of the challenging thing about writing an inaugural poem. You’re speaking to everyone, but you don’t also want to speak for everyone.
The rules or ‘laws’ of poetry are only tentative devices, an approximate scheme. There is no Sinaitic recipe for poetry, for the individual poem is the norm.
I find that my reading, particularly nonfiction, can inspire a poem as well as anything else.
The only real evidence that any critic may bring before his gaze is the finished poem.
It seems to me that readers sometimes make the genesis of a poem more mysterious than it is (by that I perhaps mean, think of it as something outside their own experience).
Jews have a special relationship to books, and the Haggadah has been translated more widely, and reprinted more often, than any other Jewish book. It is not a work of history or philosophy, not a prayer book, user’s manual, timeline, poem or palimpsest – and yet it is all these things.
The novel is born of disillusionment; the poem, of despair.
Creating a poem is a continual process of re-creating your ignorance, in the sense of not knowing what’s coming next.
Verse is not written, it is bled; Out of the poet’s abstract head. Words drip the poem on the page; Out of his grief, delight and rage.
Humor, for me, is really a gate of departure. It’s a way of enticing a reader into a poem so that less funny things can take place later. It really is not an end in itself, but a means to an end.
As a reader with next to no knowledge of classical mythology, I approached ‘The Aeneid’ just as I would a contemporary poem or novel – and, despite my ignorance, I was rewarded with a rich and affecting portrait of, among other things, the memorably doomed love affair between Aeneas and Dido.
Art is not the kind of thing where you get what you put into it all the time. So I learned to not expect anything other than the sort of joy of having a poem in front of me.
When I discovered the lyric poem, that advanced not by narrative steps but by blocks and layers of imagery, I said, ‘Gee, I probably could do that. So let me try that.’
The first time I got onstage was when I was about 5 years old. It was at a church social, and I had a poem to recite.
A poem can have an impact, but you can’t expect an audience to understand all the nuances.
I can’t tell you where a poem comes from, what it is, or what it is for: nor can any other man. The reason I can’t tell you is that the purpose of a poem is to go past telling, to be recognised by burning.
A picture is a poem without words.
The poem is a little myth of man’s capacity of making life meaningful. And in the end, the poem is not a thing we see-it is, rather, a light by which we may see-and what we see is life.
And your very flesh shall be a great poem.
Most poets are young simply because they have not been caught up. Show me an old poet, and I’ll show you, more often than not, either a madman or a master… it’s when you begin to lie to yourself in a poem in order simply to make a poem that you fail. That is why I do not rework poems.
The poem is sad because it wants to be yours, and cannot be.
I shall try to write a poem that is about the moment but doesn’t betray things that are true to me as a poet.
I believe that poems are a score for performance by the reader, and that you become the speaking voice. You don’t read or overhear the voice in the poem – you are the voice in the poem.
I accept all interpretations of my films. The only reality is before the camera. Each film I make is kind of a return to poetry for me, or at least an attempt to create a poem.
I first got caught up in this marvelous feeling of being spoken to in that very direct, private, magical way by a poem when I was really young. I was in grade school and had found an Emily Dickinson poem in a textbook.
Poetry is my cheap means of transportation. By the end of the poem the reader should be in a different place from where he started. I would like him to be slightly disoriented at the end, like I drove him outside of town at night and dropped him off in a cornfield.
I love to compare different time frames. Poetry can evoke the time of the subject. By a very careful choice of words you can evoke an era, completely throw the poem into a different time scale.
No good poem, however confessional it may be, is just a self-expression. Who on earth would claim that the pearl expresses the oyster?
Sunday is a likely day to write a poem. Because poetry is a piece of language flying around: you’ll find notebooks, something on your phone. It’s about finding them and getting them off that crumpled piece of paper and onto my computer.
I’ve got a poem that’s in a lot of international anthologies called ‘After the Anonymous Swedish’ and I thought, ‘Well, I’m a Swede. I can make up a Swedish poem.’ It turned out pretty good.
I have never started a poem yet whose end I knew. Writing a poem is discovering.
Words are so often used in the opposite sense, as a screen of diversion. It’s the struggle towards truthfulness which is the same whether one is writing a poem, a novel or an argument.
Poetry, whatever the manifest content of the poem, is always a violation of the rationalism and morality of bourgeois society.
The main thing a poem ought to be is musical. It should be rhythmic. You should hear it as a musical piece in your head as you’re writing it.
One of my greatest joys is poetry. I read it almost every day, and I’ve even taken a stab at writing some of my own. A poem I wrote for my mother when she was dying really helped me get through that hard time.
I have a personal little routine that I do in my dressing room just to kind of get myself mentally prepared to go on stage, and part of that is a poem that I read to myself.
One will never again look at a birch tree, after the Robert Frost poem, in exactly the same way.
I think that there are fiction writers for whom that works well. I could never do it. I feel as if, by the time I see that it’s a poem, it’s almost written in my head somewhere.
The figure a poem makes. It begins in delight and ends in wisdom… in a clarification of life – not necessarily a great clarification, such as sects and cults are founded on, but in a momentary stay against confusion.
Generally speaking, rhyme is the marker for the end of a line. The first rhyme-word is like a challenge thrown down, which the poem itself has to respond to.
A poem need not have a meaning and like most things in nature often does not have.
The commitment to working at poetry is important because a poet is a maker, and a poem is a made thing. We have to honor our feelings by working to transform them into something meaningful and lasting.
I love rhymes; I love to write a poem about New York and rhyme ‘oysters’ with ‘The Cloisters.’ And ‘The lady from Knoxville who bought her brassieres by the boxful.’ I just feel a sort of small triumph.
My attention span was quite short and I just wanted to use a lot of beautiful words. When I read a poem like ‘Howl’, or ‘Lady Lazarus’ by Sylvia Plath, I felt myself being moved – I wanted to do that for other people.
