Poem Quotes
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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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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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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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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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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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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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A poem is the realization of love. . . .
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A writer's work often reflects what he or she has been exposed to in life; experiences which are the groundwork of a poem or a story.
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One writes a poem when one is so taken up by an emotional concept that one is unable to remain silent.
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When I feel something very intensely or deeply or personally, I can go to extremes of self-expression or self-analysis by writing a poem - more than I can just talking to somebody or writing prose.
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But my research had taught me that the tissue of contradictions that was my personality was itself, at best, a poem, where “poem” is understood as referring to a failure of language to be equal to the possibilities it figures; only then could my fraudulence be a project and not merely a pathology; only then could my distance from myself be redescribed as critical, aesthetic, as opposed to a side effect of what experts might call my substance problem, felicitous phrase, the origins of which lay not in my desire to evade reality, but in my desire to have a chemical excuse for reality’s unavailability.
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A "poem" is understood as something referring to a failure of language to be equal to the possibilities it figures.
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This is what you should do: love the earth and sun and the animals, despise riches, give alms to everyone that asks, stand up for the stupid and crazy, devote your income and labor to others, hate tyrants, argue not concerning God, have patience and indulgence toward the people, take off your hat to nothing known or unknown or to any man or number of men ... re-examine all you have been told at school or church or in any book, dismiss what insults your own soul, and your very flesh shall be a great poem.
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On the opposite page, there was a poem. It described how beauty and truth mattered more than anything else. They were the same thing. But it didn't matter how pretty you painted the world.
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I've been building a fiction in part around the Marfa poem since my brief residency there, which has kept it from receding into the past.
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Tonight I see no spheres, but project myself and gaze back, an important trick because the goal is to be on both sides of the poem, shuttling between the you and I.
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My secret dream is to write an epic poem. That's probably the most pretentious thing I've said.
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Roses are red, violets are blue, I'm sick of this poem, you probably are too.
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In a machine, every part has a function. In a poem, every word needs to be there.
