Poems Quotes

I tend to like poems that engage me - that is to say, which do not bore me.

I used to carry about with me a German map-case filled with poems.

I am a guest of the French language. My poems in French are born of my interaction with the French language, which is not the same as that of a French poet.

Many of my poems are not sexual.

I started off in England and very few people knew I was Australian. I mean, the clues were in the poems, but they didn't read them very carefully, and so for years and years I was considered completely part of the English poetry scene.

I didn't think about whether I was writing poems. I was thinking. And the more I was thinking, the more there was I didn't understand.

The Black Mountain poet I like most is the early Creeley. Those early poems seem very lyrical and very traditional, with a lot of voice and character.

You know, I used to say, when people say, 'How do you think about what to write about in the poems every week?' And I say, 'Well, I have to turn it in on Monday, so on Sunday nights I turn the shower to iambic pentameter and it sort of works out that way.'

I liked the kid who wrote me that he had to do a term paper on a modern poet and he was doing me because, though they say you have to read poems twice, he found he could handle mine in one try.

I invented animals and birds - I had about two dozen. After working on them for six months, I sat down and just for fun wrote two dozen poems to accompany the drawings. It was for no one to every see, but a friend sent me in to an editor.

The only difference between me and others is that they think they can change something with cute little poems, nice cards or embracing trees and being nice to little lapdogs.

My poems were just kind of all over the place. They had no focus, no location, nothing. Kind of a series of images that could have been set anywhere. A lot of the poems were just exercises for myself.

There'll always be working people in my poems because I grew up with them, and I am a poet of memory.

No poems can please for long or live that are written by water drinkers.

I've already written 300 space poems. But I look upon my ultimate form as being a poetic prose. When you read it, it appears to be prose, but within the prose you have embedded the techniques of poetry.

Keats writes better about poems than anybody I've ever read. The things that he says about what he wants his own poems to be are the ideals that I share.

Our poems will have failed if our readers are not brought by them beyond the poems.

It's easy to understand why the most beautiful poems about England in the spring were written by poets living in Italy at the time.

Everyone thinks they're going to write one book of poems or one novel.

My favorite poets may not be your bread and butter. I have more favorite poems than favorite poets.

I was writing notes, but not composing poems. The Hunter began to develop out of this fragmented process.

How do poems grow? They grow out of your life.

Yes, I do often write poems from the mind, but I hope I don't ignore feelings and emotions.

My first collection of poems was published by Bloodaxe Books, which was then a very new imprint.

But I can't and don't ever want to write bell-yanking confetti-tossing hat-throwing poems.

In all the poems I've written I've not really engaged in politics, and when I've found myself moving in that direction I've always stopped myself.

My poems - I don't even like the sound of that, in a way. Not that anyone else wrote them. But we know that only people who are really close to us care about our personal experience.

Indeed, I would venture to guess that Anon, who wrote so many poems without signing them, was often a woman.

I work on words quite separately to music. They're both ongoing, and I don't ever feel like I'm working in a cycle in that respect, because it's every day anyway, no matter what I'm doing. Then I get to a point when I've collected together enough words that seem like they want to be songs rather than poems, or sometimes not.

If I were to die thinking that I'd written three poems that people might read after me, I would feel that I hadn't lived in vain. Great poets might expect the whole body of their work, but most of us - well, I would settle for a handful.