Poem Quotes
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The Orphic Machine is the poem: a severed head with face turned away that sings.
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A poem should be odd as a small cast-iron platypus.
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What is WIND and what is BONE have never been conclusively determined by the generations of Chinese critics, but what is certain, according to Liu Hsieh, is that the perfect combination or balance of WIND and BONE, the metaphor for the ideal poem, is a bird.
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The [book of the bible] Song Of Songs is an amazing erotic love poem that the church has tried very hard not to notice. It is really beautiful, and musical in its poetry.
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I probably write a poem every 50 years.
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I have no desire to dress up my poetry and make it fancy. I want the poem to be as true as humanly possible to the feeling that inspired it. That's my only concern. Everything else seems wrong.
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When a woman writes you a poem, she spends time with the gods on your behalf.
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Our contempt for any particular poem must be perfect, be total, because only a ruthless reading that allows us to measure the gap between the actual and the virtual will enable to to experience, if not a genuine poem—no such thing—a place for the genuine, whatever that might mean.
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I'm not very good at praying, but what I experience when I'm writing a poem is close to prayer.
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It’s a hymn of the heretic, a piyut liturgical poem of a modern, doubtful person.
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Men are so inclined to content themselves with what is commonest; the spirit and the senses so easily grow dead to the impressions of the beautiful and perfect, that every one should study, by all methods, to nourish in his mind the faculty of feeling these things. ...For this reason, one ought every day at least, to hear a little song, read a good poem, see a fine picture, and, if it were possible, to speak a few reasonable words.
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...a good poem contains both meaning and music.
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It was like how, when he read a poem to himself, the rhymes were neither sound nor silence. Unheard melodies in the mind’s ear. The muted music of consciousness.
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Do not wait for a poem; a poem is too fast for you. Do not wait for the poem; run with the poem and then write the poem.
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I write one poem a year, usually in January or February.
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Every day look at a beautiful picture, read a beautiful poem, listen to some beautiful music, and if possible, say some reasonable thing.
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What's interesting about songs where the writer is genuinely in love with words is that it's easy to read the lyrics like a poem.
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If the poem has no obvious destination, there's a chance that we'll be all setting off on an interesting ride.
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Most of the poems I write go through forty versions and then stay in a file on my computer. I'm not very good at sending stuff out or feeling that something is ready to send out and I never have been. Part of the problem is that as soon as a poem is finished, it stops being all that interesting to me.
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I don't think there's any law where you have to read a poem and immediately understand it.
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A poem (surely someone has said this before) is a one-night stand, a short story a love affair, and a novel a marriage.
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Poetry arises from the desire to get beyond the finite and the historical - the human world of violence and difference - and to reach the transcendent or divine. You’re moved to write a poem… But as soon as you move from that impulse to the actual poem, the song of the infinite is compromised by the finitude of its terms. In a dream your verses can defeat time, your words can shake off the history of their usage, you can represent what can’t be represented, but when you wake, when you rejoin your friends around the fire, you’re back in the human world with its inflexible laws and logic.
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Reading a good poem can give me a far bigger kick than a novel. But it's not something I can keep doing. It would be like shooting up 10 times a day.
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Anything is a poem if you say it often enough.
