The poem is the literary form of the 21st century. It’s able to connect young people in a deep way to language… it’s language as play.
In my world, history comes down to language and art. No one cares much about what battles were fought, who won them and who lost them – unless there is a painting, a play, a song or a poem that speaks of the event.
Well, it’s a badge of honour for any self-respecting poet to be criticized by Auberon Waugh. 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.
Today is the first of August. It is hot, steamy and wet. It is raining. I am tempted to write a poem. But I remember what it said on one rejection slip: ‘After a heavy rainfall, poems titled ‘Rain’ pour in from across the nation.’
The difference between ‘lighght’ and another type of poem with more words is that it doesn’t have a reading process. Even a five-word poem has a beginning, middle, and end. A one-word poem doesn’t. You can see it all at once. It’s instant.
There are parts on ‘Wind’s Poem’ that are literal recordings of wind. I had this old sound effects record that I got some wind from and then I figured out that distorted cymbals sound just like wind so I used that a lot.
My secret dream is to write an epic poem. That’s probably the most pretentious thing I’ve said.
I have never written a play, a story, a poem, or my one film – anything – unless something was troubling me enough, wrecking me, in fact, to drive me back into the absurdity of writing. I do not enjoy writing.
Scientific understanding is often beautiful, a profoundly aesthetic experience which gives pleasure not unlike the reading of a great poem.
Weaknesses have a certain function in a poem… some strategy in order to pave the reader’s way to the impact of this or that line.
What is the poem, after it is written? That is the question. Not where it came from or why.
When Keats says: ‘Axioms in philosophy are not axioms until they are proved upon our pulses’, what he means is that we don’t necessarily believe what a poem is saying if it comes out and tells us in an absolutely head-on, in-your-face way; we only believe it to be true if we feel it to be true.
The monotony of a long heroic poem may often be pleasantly relieved by judicious interruptions in the perfect succession of rhymes, just as the metre may sometimes be adorned with occasional triplets and Alexandrines.
I wrote a poem on my leg once, on the skin.
The best thing anybody has ever done is to advise me against publishing a poem that shows me at less than my best, such as it is. That’s the kind of advice most of us resist but really should relish.
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.
I am still interested in the long or serial poem, but have written a few smaller things. I may start sending to journals again in a year or so… that’s about it.
People are so used to reading novels now, they just read a poem straight through to get the meaning. And that’s something totally different from the slow way you read something if it’s a tune; which to me a poem has to be.
Someone told me just recently that poets are eulogists. It’s their job, to eulogize. I didn’t know that, but it makes sense. Because in almost every poem of mine there is a loss.
We all need poetry. The moments in our lives that are characterized by language that has to do with necessity or the market, or just, you know, things that take us away from the big questions that we have, those are the things that I think urge us to think about what a poem can offer.
Good poets have written in order to describe something or to preach something – with their eye on the object or the end. The essence of the poetry does not lie in the thing described or in the message imparted but in the resulting concrete unity, the poem.
One day, I just got up to read a poem and started singing. I looked around – the reaction was great. And I said, ‘Oh, boy. I like this.’
Sometimes, I think the best kind of poem is one in which there is an acute balance between what is humorous and that which is very serious. That balance is very hard to strike. But it can be done.
I try to write very fast. I don’t revise very much. I write the poem in one sitting. Just let it rip. It’s usually over in twenty to forty minutes. I’ll go back and tinker with a word or two, change a line for some metrical reason weeks later, but I try to get the whole thing just done.
I think poetry is the only domain where a writer you like can truly be said to influence you, because you read and reread a poem so many times that it simply drills itself into your head.
A poem may be an instance of morality, of social conditions, of psychological history; it may instance all its qualities, but never one of them alone, nor any two or three; never less than all.
A Poem does not grow by jerks. As trees in Spring produce a new ring of tissue, so does every poet put forth a fresh outlay of stuff at the same season.
In many ways, I feel like the form carries so much of the weight in a poem, obviously. But I think we sometimes forget that.
I do read a poem almost every morning. Unless I’m really, really late, I have to get my poem in.
Do not wait for a poem; a poem is too fast for you. Do not wait for the poem; run with the poem and then write the poem.
‘Two Voices,’ from my album with Peter Schwalm, is an intact dream-poem. I awoke one night with an image of a piece of paper and all the words of the poem written on it, so I just blundered down to the kitchen table and ‘copied it out.’
One of the rules of Greek lament poetry is that it mustn’t mention the dead by name in case of invoking a ghost. Maybe the ‘Iliad,’ crowded with names, is more than a poem. Maybe it’s a dangerous piece of the brightness of both this world and the next.
‘Aurat’ is an iconic poem which is relevant 70 years later and informs me in the work I do with women.
When I see great boxers, it’s like reading a wonderful poem.
What we call a poem is mostly what is not there on the page. The strength of any poem is the poems that it has managed to exclude.
Your response to literature is to do with maturity; if you don’t respond to a book or a poem when you are 12, you might when you are 13.
Truck drivers stop me and say, ‘What is the poem for the day?’ or ‘Give me a poem for my girl.’ I have one on almost every subject.
The first thing I tried to do in the months after losing my mother was to write a poem. I found myself turning to poetry in the way so many people do – to make sense of losses. And I wrote pretty bad poems about it. But it did feel that the poem was the only place that could hold this grief.
I think what gets a poem going is an initiating line. Sometimes a first line will occur, and it goes nowhere; but other times – and this, I think, is a sense you develop – I can tell that the line wants to continue. If it does, I can feel a sense of momentum – the poem finds a reason for continuing.
I find purer philosophy in a Poem than in a Conclusion of Geometry, a chemical analysis, or a physical law.
I can write a poem in 10 minutes. I like writing songs; I can write songs in 5 or 10 minutes. My concentration seems very short.
The reason one writes poems is so that your poem will be remembered.
If a poem is not memorable, there’s probably something wrong. One of the problems of free verse is that much of the free verse poetry is not memorable.
Our moments of inspiration are not lost though we have no particular poem to show for them; for those experiences have left an indelible impression, and we are ever and anon reminded of them.
The reader’s challenge is to replicate the experiment by reading the poem and to draw their own conclusions.
I was taught that poems don’t end, they just kind of stop. There’s never an ending to a poem; it’s a continuation for later. When I write, I write for me, and I write in poetic form.
The dance is a poem of which each movement is a word.
It is tiring to be Turkish. The country is badly polarised, bitterly politicized. Every writer, journalist, poet knows that because of an article, a novel, an interview, a poem or a tweet you can be sued, put on trial, even arrested. Self-censorship is widespread.
It’s dangerous to accept crisis as your baseline. It gets harder and harder to see the anti-crises that are so requisite to happiness: the quiet times, the crucial pauses – like those in a poem.
Beginning a poem, the poet as a rule doesn’t know the way it’s going to come out, and at times, he is very surprised by the way it turns out, since often it turns out better than he expected; often his thought carries further than he reckoned.
I always acted in high school. Actually, I started in preschool. I was in a play about Jesus. I went to a Catholic school and played an angel and recited some poem about Jesus. It felt so long to me at the time.
For me, a poem is an opportunity to kind of interrogate myself a little bit.
I think the way poems are taught to high school students is completely counterintuitive; it sets up this sense of being the poem’s adversary. The poem is sort of sneakily trying to outsmart you.
