Poems Quotes

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 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.

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.

But you'd have a job to find many of my poems which would seem to be very influenced by a particular person.

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.

My horizon on humanity is enlarged by reading the writers of poems, seeing a painting, listening to some music, some opera, which has nothing at all to do with a volatile human condition or struggle or whatever. It enriches me as a human being.

The title of the poems was The Only Bar in Dixon. We sent it out to The New Yorker on a fluke, and they took them and printed all three in the same issue.

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.

And Robert Lowell, of course - in his poems, we're not located in his actual life. We're located more in the externals, in the journalistic facts of his life.

I grew up in a bookless house - my parents didn't read poetry, so if I hadn't had the chance to experience it at school I'd never have experienced it. But I loved English, and I was very lucky in that I had inspirational English teachers, Miss Scriven and Mr. Walker, and they liked us to learn poems by heart, which I found I loved doing.

I went on all over the States, ranting poems to enthusiastic audiences that, the week before, had been equally enthusiastic about lectures on Railway Development or the Modern Turkish Essay.

However, I began to submit poems to British magazines, and some were accepted. It was a great moment to see my first poems published. It felt like entering a tradition.

You don't help people in your poems. I've been trying to help people all my life - that's my trouble.