A great poem leaves so much room for everybody to have such a different reaction to it.
I see the poem or the novel ending with an open door.
The idea of how to read a poem is based on the idea that poetry needs you as a reader. That the experience of poetry, the meaning in poetry, is a kind of circuit that takes place between a poet, a poem and a reader, and that meaning doesn’t exist or inhere in poems alone.
A poem is a naked person… Some people say that I am a poet.
Peace goes into the making of a poem as flour goes into the making of bread.
If you write a letter of resignation or something with an agenda, you’re simply using a pen to record what you have thought out. In a poem, the pen is more like a flashlight, a Geiger counter, or one of those metal detectors that people walk around beaches with.
I’ve thought of the last line of some poems for years and tried them out, It wouldn’t work because the last line was much too beautiful for the poem.
The question of sort of music and history, I think, are so important to understanding the poem as an idea but also us as people in the world.
If you have a good story idea, don’t assume it must form a prose narrative. It may work better as a play, a screenplay or a poem. Be flexible.
My favourite poem is the one that starts ‘Thirty days hath September’ because it actually tells you something.
Pain is filtered in a poem so that it becomes finally, in the end, pleasure.
My feeling is that poetry will wither on the vine if you don’t regularly come back to the simplest fundamentals of the poem: rhythm, rhyme, simple subjects – love, death, war.
In history class, I wrote a poem, ‘The Royalists and the Roundheads.’ I would write poems about driftwood in art class and little stories about the sun, moon, and stars in science class. Since not many kids were writing in class, I got away with it.
A good poem is an amazing thing: a perfectly distilled, articulate moment. It opens you up – sometimes slowly, like the blooming of a flower, and sometimes with a quick knife-slice.
When you look at classical structures, they’re often linked to literature, music, or a poem. They were constructed by master builders, which means it’s not something standard that you can copy.
One Christmas I had no money, and so I went home and just, like, wrote a poem; I mean, I didn’t write them, but I just handed out poems as Christmas presents. Like, ‘Here’s a Pablo Neruda poem that really made me think of you.’
I was actually a poetry major in college before I punted and decided to become a theater major. I wrote the poem that we put on the sauerkraut boxes in the style of Elling.
No poem is easily grasped; so why should any reader expect fast results?
When you put a poem on a Kindle, the lines are broken in order to fit on the screen. And so instead of being the poet’s decision, it becomes the device’s decision.
What I responded to, on the page, was the way a poem could liberate, by means of a word’s setting, through subtleties of timing, of pacing, that word’s full and surprising range of meaning. It seemed to me that simple language best suited this enterprise.
Love is poetry. To fall in love with a person is like understanding a deep, moving poem. Noticing every little detail. To see what the poet shows, to smell what he describes and the urge to taste the intangible.
Sometimes a poem appeals to me technically, just because of the way a line feels on my lips. Sometimes it is because it says something I have felt, or sometimes something that I suddenly recognise. Other times it can change the way I see something.
Daydreaming is one of the key sources of poetry – a poem often starts as a daydream that finds its way into language – and walking seems to bring a different sort of alertness, an associative kind of thinking, a drifting state of mind.
I first became aware of the delights of the natural world when my father, an entomologist, presented me with what looked like a twig. When it got up and walked, my delight was such that I wrote a poem, ‘To a Walking Stick.’
My works really begin in a very simple way. Sometimes it’s an image, and sometimes it’s words I might write, like a fragment of a poem.
I’ve written on public matters, but I don’t understand how anyone could tout me as a possible poet laureate when I wrote a poem on the abdication of King Charles III or about the sex life of the Royals… anybody who knew my work would know I’m not a contender.
There’s no artist in this world that doesn’t enjoy the dream that if they have bad reviews now, the story of Keats can redeem them, in their fantasy or imagination, in the future. I think Keats’ poem ‘Endymion’ is a really difficult poem, and I’m not surprised that a lot of people pulled it apart in a way.
Sometimes my boyfriend would write the lyrics and I would write the melody, and other times I would start from scratch. Or sometimes I would take a local poem and put that to music.
I think that you certainly don’t have to be aged and travel the world to write a poem.
My first spoken word poem, packed with all the wisdom of a 14-year-old, was about the injustice of being seen as unfeminine. The poem was very indignant, and mainly exaggerated, but the only spoken word poetry that I had seen up until that point was mainly indignant, so I thought that that’s what was expected of me.
Twitter was like a poem. It was rich, real and spontaneous. It really fit my style. In a year and a half, I tweeted 60,000 tweets, over 100,000 words. I spent a minimum eight hours a day on it, sometimes 24 hours.
I’ve always felt, with ‘The Iliad,’ a real frustration that it’s read wrong. That it’s turned into this public school poem, which I don’t think it is. That glamorising of war, and white-limbed, flowing-haired Greek heroes – it’s become a cliched, British empire part of our culture.
History is a cyclic poem written by time upon the memories of man.
For me, the source material can come from anywhere. It can be a poem, it can be a dream, it can be a movie, as long as the end part of it is interesting – that’s what it’s about for me.
The United States themselves are essentially the greatest poem.
A translation is no translation, he said, unless it will give you the music of a poem along with the words of it.
In a long poem or a sequence of poems, you’re trying to formalize your obsessions and give them a shape and a name. The key is to realize if the connections you are making are ones with resonance.
Like a pianist runs her fingers over the keys, I’ll search my mind for what to say. Now, the poem may want you to write it. And then sometimes you see a situation and think, ‘I’d like to write about that.’ Those are two different ways of being approached by a poem, or approaching a poem.
A poem might be defined as thinking about feelings – about human feelings and frailties.
‘The Odyssey’ is a great poem to refugee-dom… Odysseus is not entirely a refugee… he’s somebody who’s blown off course. The entire book is an exploration of that theme… I reread it every year… That’s not as surprising as it sounds, because it’s a rip-roaring book.
Claudia Rankine’s book-length poem ‘Citizen’ was nominated for National Book Critics Circle awards in the categories of poetry and criticism. It is one of the most devastating takes on American culture I have read in a long time, laying bare the stakes of being black in a country long ambivalent about our presence here.
Only truthful hands write true poems. I cannot see any basic difference between a handshake and a poem.
I know the sag of the unfinished poem. And I know the release of the poem that is finished.
Knowing some Greek helped defuse forbidding words – not that I counted much on using them. You’ll find only trace elements of this language in the poem.
The first test any poem must pass is no longer, ‘Is it true to nature?’ but a criterion looking in a different direction: namely, ‘Is it sincere? Is it genuine?’
The long poem cannot be a digressive, expansive, boring exposition. It is really made of very sharp, Imagistic, quintessential poetic elements.
The incredible cinematography makes ‘A Walk to Beautiful’ almost like a poem; there is a tenderness on display that seems to emanate from the camera. There is also great sensitivity to the women whose stories are being told – never did I have a sense of the subjects being exploited.
In a Transtromer poem, you inhabit space differently; a body becomes a thing, a mind floats, things have lives, and even non-things, even concepts, are alive.
My favourite poem is called ‘Roots and Wings’ – it’s a very moving poem about how if you’ve got real roots you can fly.
I’m very impressed by the imagery in the ‘Apologia’, which is a kind of sustained poem. It’s not just a piece of apologetics of the sort you find in Jesuit literature: ‘Why I came over’, and so on. It’s a tremendously rewarding book but requires perseverance on the part of the reader.
Every time you read a poem aloud to yourself in the presence of others, you are reading it into yourself and them. Voice helps to carry words farther and deeper than the eye.
If you’re a songwriter, you have to do homework. You can exist for a while on the inspiration, but at some point, you have to sit down and have the discipline to write – to finish the poem, as they say.
The box was a universe, a poem, frozen on the boundaries of human experience.
