Get QuoteDark Inspirational Quotes App

" A person who's only suffering can't write a poem. There are choices to be made, and you need to be objective. "

Related Quotes:

" Life has to have the plenitude of art. "

" I believe in rooting poems in actual places, even if you move into some other extraordinary realm. "

" Poetry takes place in time. It is a durational. Things take place in sequence. "

" When I taught at the University of Houston in the Creative Writing program, we required the poets to take workshops in fiction writing, and we required the fiction writers to take workshops in poetry. "

" I find great consolation in having a lot of poetry books around. I believe that writing poetry and reading it are deeply intertwined. I've always delighted in the company of the poets I've read. "

" Each book should be an entity unto itself, with its own structure, character, life, name. "

" The very good thing about MFA programs is their democratizing. They bring a lot of different people to the table. "

Different People

" I began to imitate what I was reading, and I started to become a poet, even though what I was writing were not good poems. "

" The elegy does the work of mourning; it allows us to experience mortality. It turns loss into remembrance, and it delivers an inheritance. "

" I like the machinery of poems, especially when they have human warmth. "

" There are still many tribal cultures where poetry and song, there is just one word for them. There are other cultures with literacy where poetry and song are distinguished. But poetry always remembers that it has its origins in music. "

" I think ancient cultures incorporated death into the experience of life in a more natural way than we have done. In our obsessive focus on youth, on celebrity, our denial of death makes it harder for people who are grieving to find a place for that grief. "

" The idea of a poem as a message in a bottle means that it's sent out towards some future reader, and the reader who opens that bottle becomes the addressee of the literary text. "

" The idea that a poem was a made thing stayed with me, and I decided then that I wanted to be an artist, not just a diarist. So I put myself through a kind of apprenticeship in writing poetry, and I understood even then that my practice as a poet was deeply related to my reading. "

" When poetry separates from song, then the words have to carry all the rhythm themselves; they have to do all the work. They can't rely on the singing voice. "

" I'm so happy to be an advocate for poetry. "

" The terms of poetry - some simple, some complicated, some ancient, some new - should bring us closer to what we're hearing, enlarging our experience of it, enabling us to describe what we're reading, to feel and think with greater precision. "

" I aspire to a poetry of great formal integrity, deep passion and high intellect, and I have many models for how to do that. "

" You're trying to write about something that's sacred. You're trying to bring the seriousness of life and death to it, and you're trying to find a way to dramatize it, and you're trying to give language to it, which is inadequate. But it's important to try. "

" Poems mesmerized me, and I felt better when I was writing them, or trying to - more in touch with something deep and dark within myself. "

" You are always trying to make something that is more than the sum of its parts. "

" One of the things that distinguishes poetry from ordinary speech is that in a very few number of words, poetry captures some kind of deep feeling, and rhythm is the way to get there. Rhythm is the way the poetry carries itself. "

" I still feel that I'm capable of being as emotionally present as when I was young. "

" When I was young, I wrote everything, and I thought I would be an all around writer, that I would write everything. "

" You're shadowed by your own dream, especially as you get older, of trying to create something that will last in poetry. And so, you're working on its behalf. "

" The line is a way of framing poetry. All verse is measured by lines. The poetic line immediately announces its difference from everyday speech and prose. "

" One of the things that happens to everyone who is grief-stricken, who has lost someone, is there comes a time when everyone else just wants you to get over it, but of course you don't get over it. You get stronger; you try and live on; you endure; you change; but you don't get over it. You carry it with you. "

" As far as I'm concerned, freedom is the most important thing to creativity. You should feel free to write in whatever way, whatever language, feels comfortable to you. "

" There's never been a culture without poetry in the history of the world. "

" I'd say people do need some help with poetry because I think poetry just helps takes us to places that Americans aren't always accustomed to going. "