Quotes About Inspiration

At the point where I'm trying to force something and it's not happening, and I'm getting frustrated with, say, writing a poem, I can go and pick up the brushes and start painting. At the point where the painting seems to not be going anywhere, I go and pick up the guitar.

Manipulating shadows and tonality is like writing music or a poem.

For me a poem has to sing out of itself and the lilt of it carries the magic.

What is the poem, after it is written? That is the question. Not where it came from or why.

I keep the drafts of each poem in color-coded folders. I pick up the folders according to how I feel about that color that day.

Robert Frost had always said you mustn't think of the last line first, or it's only a fake poem, not a real one. I'm inclined to agree.

The beautiful feeling after writing a poem is on the whole better even than after sex, and that's saying a lot.

When I see great boxers, it's like reading a wonderful poem.

I write with a Uni-Ball Onyx Micropoint on nine-by-seven bound notebooks made by a Canadian company called Blueline. After I do a few drafts, I type up the poem on a Macintosh G3 and then send it out the door.

A really good poem is full of music.

I make a discovery in a poem as I write it.

When I write a poem, I go into a state of self-forgetfulness, and something higher takes over; I like to call it my best self.

One reason to write a poem is to flush from the deep thickets of the self some thought, feeling, comprehension, question, music, you didn't know was in you, or in the world.

I have never written a play, a story, a poem, or my one film - anything - unless something was troubling me enough, wrecking me, in fact, to drive me back into the absurdity of writing. I do not enjoy writing.

I think what gets a poem going is an initiating line. Sometimes a first line will occur, and it goes nowhere; but other times - and this, I think, is a sense you develop - I can tell that the line wants to continue. If it does, I can feel a sense of momentum - the poem finds a reason for continuing.

I think that you certainly don't have to be aged and travel the world to write a poem.

There's something about the shape that a poem takes in my mind before I write it that has to do with suddenness.

I feel like I am in the service of the poem. The poem isn't something I make. The poem is something I serve.

I do read a poem almost every morning. Unless I'm really, really late, I have to get my poem in.

I think what gets a poem going is an initiating line. Sometimes a first line will occur, and it goes nowhere; but other times - and this, I think, is a sense you develop - I can tell that the line wants to continue.

Poetry, as odd as it is, and as hard to figure out as it is, many times, it's almost something that we're used to. It's kind of like a dream language that we had centuries ago, so that when we speak poetically or write a poem about what's going on, a real difficult issue that's facing our communities, people listen.

The most exciting thing is to read a poem out loud for the first time.

A perfect poem you can't pin down and say, 'This is exactly what it meant to me.' It's not a self-help manual.

When I'm writing the poem, I feel like I have to close my eyes. I don't mean literally, but you invite a kind of blindness, and that's the birth of the poem.