Quotes from bargen walter ii

There's a couple of reasons why I write poetry more than anything else. I have written a few, what could be called short stories, something longer than flash fiction, but after about 6 pages I found that I'm desperate to figure out how to get out of what I've created. Using that many words overwhelms me and I feel like I'm drowning.

I love to invent words but even when I think I've invented one or a new variation on a word, I often find that someone else has already made use of it.

Waking in a strange bed, I'd forgotten magpies until this morning. Beyond the window, one flies over the weathered picket fence, black-white staccato wing beat: moonlit cloud against night sky, snow-streaked shadowed mountain, manic-depressive, winged declaration of disunion.

I always seem to be in search of the missing, for something that was not quite achieved, some key to understanding that I need. Why was I there? Why did I leave? Who was I supposed to meet and didn't? Was it to be found in the store next to the one I walked into, the place that held what I was really looking for and didn't even know I was looking?

I think it's easy to see with the existence of these forms, the intermixing of prose and poetry, that they are really two sides of the same coin and that one doesn't do well without something of the other. Prose falls flat on its face without incorporating the dance of poetry and poetry has no voice without the narrative touch of prose.

It might sound a little glib, but maybe I don't know what a finished poem is. I lean toward the school that a poem is never finished, it's just abandoned.

What photons aren't banged, blocked, absorbed, diverted by our distracted attention, pass on and on.

One of the main activities of the Poet Laureate is to embody poetry. It is really helpful to see someone who presents poetry and makes them want to take poetry home with them.

Leaves are falling casualties.

I made it to the moon and nothing changed.

Writing is a kind of centering, a kind of meditation. I find it to be profoundly rewarding. Actually, I'm an addict. If I go too long, and so far that hasn't been longer than a week, I start to feel unsettled, nervous. I begin to feel that I'm not engaged, a disconnection is threatening my world, that I'm being passed by and I'm both failing myself and the world by not writing about it.

I clearly remember that I finished my first poem, though it was not very good, when I was 16 years old. I wrote it on a desk pad. It was called "Requiem" and had phrases like "the seasick swaying trees."

My path is deeply littered with favorite poems.

You are so far south I keep looking down at my thumb. Written on the wrinkled skin just below the joint the neon blue veins fan out flashing the name Utopia.

Sometimes when a prose poem is floundering, I rewrite it as verse, and it's better in that form. The reverse process of verse into prose poem, also works to clarify what's working in the writing and what's not. It's not a blunt line that demarcates the difference between verse and the prose poem.

Though I do keep lists of words that catch my attention for a variety of reasons, they rarely make it into poems, not infrequently because I lose the lists.

Sky's gray sheet spreads icy rain. Through the night we heard the branches cracking. Now they bend with the bowed ache of apostrophes. Backs to the window, sitting on the couch, we listen as the radio announces the list of schools closed.

Adopting the prose poem, allowed me to think and write more openly and broadly, and to extend and sustain a subject or object of attention more that I could in a verse poem.

The unpolished granite at the limits of homesteads, far fields, dry gulches, smoky hills, a foundation of grassy outlines, clumps of jonquils, and rotting wheels spokes. Rectangular, upright, chest-high squared limestone slabs, these high plains scarred by a single tree and magpie, slowly flying over dry seas.