Poem Quotes
-
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.
-
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.
-
...a good poem contains both meaning and music.
-
Every day look at a beautiful picture, read a beautiful poem, listen to some beautiful music, and if possible, say some reasonable thing.
-
Writing a poem is making music with words and space.
-
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.
-
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.
-
The world is a great poem, and the world's The words it is writ in, and we souls the thoughts.
-
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.
-
I don't think there's any law where you have to read a poem and immediately understand it.
-
A poem is the realization of love. . . .
-
“Who do you serve? Do you serve somebody? I serve the poem, no one.
-
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.
-
My secret dream is to write an epic poem. That's probably the most pretentious thing I've said.
-
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.
-
A "poem" is understood as something referring to a failure of language to be equal to the possibilities it figures.
-
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.
-
In a machine, every part has a function. In a poem, every word needs to be there.
-
Roses are red, violets are blue, I'm sick of this poem, you probably are too.
