Quotes About Imagination

The poem is never complete in the mind. It emerges, and then it's like an act of unveiling. The unveiling is the longest and most difficult part of it.

This creature of the poem may assemble itself into a being with its own centrifugal force.

Sometimes you have a poem that you really want to write and it never happens.

I see the shape of the poem before I start writing, and the writing is just the process of arriving at the shape.

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.

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.

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 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 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.

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.

Creating a poem is a continual process of re-creating your ignorance, in the sense of not knowing what's coming next.

One does not read a poem by Gwendolyn Brooks with hopes that it will grant him a career in engineering; he does so because poetry helps him see something in the world that he might not have seen before.

I want the poem to be an experience - for both the listener and for myself.

A poem gives me a chance to have an encounter with a feeling, with an experience, with a wish, with an idea.

The idea is to take the most ordinary things and make them extraordinary, as Gerard Manley Hopkins does in his poems.

I write almost everything, actually. Songs, poems, stories. And stories out of every genre, too.

The Hollywood movies are more like novels, and the kinds of films I make are more like poems.

I write short phrases and used to think they were poems!

The few bad poems which occasionally are created during abstinence are of no great interest.