Poems Quotes
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The world does not know it needs poems any longer, but we believe it does.
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And I will show that there is no imperfection in the present, and can be none in the future, And I will show that whatever happens to anybody it may be turned to beautiful results, And I will show that nothing can happen more beautiful than death, And I will thread a thread through my poems that time and events are compact, And that all the things of the universe are perfect miracles, each as profound as any.
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The shape that poems make in the mind is an echo of something powerful in the cosmos. I do believe that, and that is certainly irrational, so perhaps I am no wiser than Elizabeth Perkins as to the nature of poetry.
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The night before, I'd gone overboard with my Lila poems, and maybe it's true that I was hoping that in them he'd see the genius of me, the beauty of my words in his hands.
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After all, poets shouldn't be their own interpreters and shouldn't carefully dissect their poems into everyday prose; that would mean the end of being poets. Poets send their creations into the world, it is up to the reader, the aesthetician, and the critic to determine what they wanted to say with their creations.
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With my poems, I finally won even my mother. The longest wooing of my life.
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I remember as a kid during devotional in church when the “old” people would say they woke up with a song on their heart. I guess “old” people wake up with poems on their hearts too.
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I can explain all the poems that were ever invented - and a good many that haven't been invented just yet.
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Early poems are a thing it takes years to live down.
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There is no season such delight can bring, as summer, autumn, winter and the spring.
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Since the age of 11, I have loved writing poems and fragments from my life.
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I don't think of writing my poems for China or for the world. I mainly think of a small audience of friends and people I know. I am writing for that small group. They are not necessarily going to be able to read it, but that's what I have in mind when I write.
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I used to hide my real emotions in gobbledegook, like in In His Own Write. When I wrote teenage poems, I wrote in gobbledegook because I was always hiding my real emotions from Mimi.
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Many of the poems weave autobiographical elements with fabular or mythic materials.
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I don't write poems with a purpose in mind, but I'd hope that some readers would find their experiences mirrored or articulated here - and that the language would feel alive to them. Alive, in a way that is meaningful and pleasurable.
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I don't write poems. I don't give flowers to girls... yet.
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I don't want to write poems that are just really clear about how I'm aware of all the traps involved in writing poetry; I don't want to write fiction that's about the irresponsibility of writing fiction and I've thrown out a lot of writing that I think was ultimately tainted by that kind of self-awareness.
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Poverty is very good in poems but very bad in the house; very good in maxims and sermons but very bad in practical life.
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My dream right now is - and I don't know how to do it, and I don't know if it will work exactly - but just this sort of vague aspiration to start some kind of website where people send in their stories or poems, and me or perhaps some other people turn that into music. And then by the end of the year we make a record and actually put it out. Like a band, but the band is actually a combination of the musician and the fan. I think that's a very 21st-century way of doing it.
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Poems seem to have a life of their own. They tell you when enough is enough.
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I wondered if I was just the sum of my brain scan, little dots clustered in my frontal lobe. Is that where the poems came from? The desire to destroy myself? This last depression had scared me. It had come on so quickly, not like the gradual woolgathering in my brain I had known before.
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One of the things about landays is that they thrive in a modern context. Early on I went to this incredible Pashtun novelist, Mustafa Salik, who is a bestselling novelist in Afghanistan and works for the BBC in Pashto. With the question of the sanctity of the poems in mind, I asked him, "Aren't you worried? They've been posted on Facebook and such." And he said, "Just the opposite. This is a folk form; they survive and thrive as people share them."
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My poems and prose are not often in direct conversation with each other, but there's so much crossover - everything that comes out of that crucible of language - that working in poetry and prose is energizing - to me as a writer and to the work itself.
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The poems are part of my attempt to understand being in the world in an honest way.
