Quotes About Poems

There'll always be working people in my poems because I grew up with them, and I am a poet of memory.

My first book was an adult novel, 'Down Among the Gods,' published by Virago, and I've written poems as well, a slim volume of poetry.

If I were assigned poems I suppose I'd write more of them but it is entirely voluntary and for the most part ignored in the market sense of the word so the language to me is most intimate, most important, most sublime and most satisfying when it gets done.

Language is an efficient ordering of the world's enigmatic abundance. Verbiage for Poems

Who are you, reader, reading my poems a hundred years hence? I cannot send you one single flower from this wealth of the spring, one single streak of gold from yonder clouds. Open your doors and look abroad. From your blossoming garden gather fragrant memories of the vanished flowers of an hundred years before. In the joy of your heart may you feel the living joy that sang one spring morning, sending its glad voice across an hundred years.

I haven't shifted language. I'm writing in English because I like it. I'm a sucker for the language, but the good old poems I'm still writing in Russian.

In 1977, I wrote a series of poems about a character, Black Bart, a former cattle rustler-turned-alchemist. A good friend, Claude Purdy, who is a stage director, suggested I turn the poems into a play.

One of my graduate school professors, to whom I started sending poems when I started writing again after a 10-year hiatus, suggested I prepare a book manuscript which he could send to publishers for me.

On a very personal level, I have fond memories of spending a lot of time in the Library of Congress working on my collection of poems 'Native Guard.' I was there over a summer doing research in the archives and then writing in the reading room at the Jefferson building.

The ancients have left us model heroic poems in which the heroes furnish the whole interest of the story, and we are still unable to accustom ourselves to the fact that for our epoch histories of that kind are meaningless.

His self and the sun were oneAnd his poems, although makings of his self,Were no less makings of the sun.

I say that democracy can never prove itself beyond cavil, until it founds and luxuriantly grows its own forms of art, poems, schools, theology, displacing all that exists, or that has been produced anywhere in the past, under opposite influences.

All poems live or die in the concerted arrangement of syllables into patterns that are alternatively broken or reinforced. Wyatt taught me that." —James Longenbach

They didn't have much trouble teaching the ape to write poems: first they strapped him into a chair, then tied the pencil around his hand (the paper had already been nailed down). Then Dr. Bluespire leaned over his shoulder and whispered into his ear: 'You look like a god sitting there. Why don't you try writing something?

Necessity for a more unyielding discipline of my life. Recognize the uselessness of blind anger. Limit society. Use children's school hours better, for work & solitude. Refuse to be distracted from own style o flife. Less waste. Be harder & harder on poems.

His poems have no capital letters in them, which is, I believe, the essence of modernity.

His poems have no capital letters in them, which is, I believe, the essence of modernity. His books are about unpleasant people leading lives of surpassing dullness.

It is spring again. The earth is like a child that knows poems by heart.

To the kids, this extravagant convoy might even seem normal. They'll have to see ordinary trains, at other times in other places, do you realise just how magical this caravan of gypsies is. A few years in Europe will suffice for them to recreate the landscapes handed down to them by their patriarchs and discover that their life is just a chronicle foretold. Then these men of maize will only have to write well to get the Nobel Prize for poems of love and songs of despair.

Nathan said, "Not a chance. I've heard him recite it in class. He knows dozens of Poe's poems by heart. 'The Raven,' 'Lenore,' 'The Lake,' 'To Annie'…dozens of them. Sometimes I think he fucking channels Poe.

You and I are from two different worlds. Nonsense. We have much in common. We both like books, dogs, poems, Sir Walter Scott, dogs - I could go on. You listed dogs twice. It does not matter; I still made my point. No, you haven't.

These poems, with all their crudities, doubts, and confusions, are written for the love of Man and in praise of God, and I'd be a damn' fool if they weren't.

We must begin to understand the nature of intertextuality . . . the manner by which texts poems and novels respond to other texts. After all, all cats may be black at night, but not to other cats.

Poems not only demand patience, they demand a kind of surrender. You must give yourself up to them. This is the real food for a poet: other poems, not meat loaf.