Poem Quotes

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.

A poem begins as a lump in the throat, a sense of wrong, a homesickness, a lovesickness.

A poem conveys not a message so much as the provenance of a message, an advent of sense.

I got $30 from Nation magazine for a poem and $500 for my first book of poems.

In the late 60s and early 70s, I did get interested in voices, and in narration and embodying the voice, making the poem sound like a real person talking.

The poem is sad because it wants to be yours, and cannot be.

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.

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.

For me, a poem is an opportunity to kind of interrogate myself a little bit.

If you read quickly to get through a poem to what it means, you have missed the body of the poem.

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.

A poem generated by its own laws may be unrealized and bad in terms of so-called objective principles of taste, judgement, deduction.

Every now and then I read a poem that does touch something in me, but I never turn to poetry for solace or pleasure in the way that I throw myself into prose.

I consider a poem to be a kind of experiment where a number of elements are brought together under test conditions to see how they will interact to create meaning or relevance.

A picture is a poem without words.

With several different kinds of poetry to choose from, a man would decide that he would like best to be an epic poet, and he would set out, in conscious determination, on an epic poem.

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.

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 dance is a poem of which each movement is a word.

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.

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.

No race can prosper till it learns that there is as much dignity in tilling a field as in writing a poem.

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.

I have experienced healing through other writers' poetry, but there's no way I can sit down to write in the hope a poem will have healing potential. If I do, I'll write a bad poem.

I have a high guilt quotient. A poem can go through as many as 50 or 60 drafts. It can take from a day to two years-or longer.

Only truthful hands write true poems. I cannot see any basic difference between a handshake and a poem.

I thought I'd begin by reading a poem by Shakespeare, but then I thought, why should I? He never reads any of mine.

The poem, for me, is simply the first sound realized in the modality of being.

No other human being, no woman, no poem or music, book or painting can replace alcohol in its power to give man the illusion of real creation.

Like a French poem is life; being only perfect in structure when with the masculine rhymes mingled the feminine are.