Poem Quotes
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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.
Paul Muldoon
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I write one poem a year, usually in January or February.
Emily Susan Rapp
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Each poem seems to demand its own formal approach. In both drafting and revision, I'll play around with line lengths and stanza formations, eventually letting the poem settle into what I think is its own best form.
Allison Joseph
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Every great man exhibits the talent of organization or construction, whether it be in a poem, a philosophical system, a policy, or a strategy. And without method there is no organization nor construction.
Edward Bulwer-Lytton, 1st Baron Lytton
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Give shape, artist! don't talk!
Your poem be but a breath.
Johann Wolfgang von Goethe
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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.
Ann Reed
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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.
Stephen Dobyns
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My secret dream is to write an epic poem. That's probably the most pretentious thing I've said.
Laurie Anderson
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A "poem" is understood as something referring to a failure of language to be equal to the possibilities it figures.
Ben Lerner
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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.
Walt Whitman
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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.
Nick Laird
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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.
Ben Lerner
