Quotes About Poems

When she got older, my mother, who was not a sentimental type at all, started to play around with poems. They weren't very good poems, but at every occasion she would write a poem and give it to us. And those are completely and utterly treasured." Her voice soft and warm and a little plaintive, she added, "Writing is the gift of your presence forever.

We writers are the worst kind of cruel, Because we worship our own stories and poems, And what human can compete with metaphors? Writers stand still and yet vacate our homes Inside our fantasies. We are word-whores, With libidos and egos of balsa wood. We'd have sex with our books, if only we could.

When I go to the shore, I take along the poems of Pablo Neruda. I suppose it's because the poems are simultaneously lush and ripe and kind of lazy, yet throbbing with life - like summer itself.

It's brief and bright, dear children; bright and brief. Delight's the lightning; the long thunder's grief. — John Frederick Nims, "Days of Our Years," Selected Poems (The University of Chicago Press, 1982)

you fantasize about me reading my poems to you - it doesn't work that way - I write down everything later - living is not an after-thought...

The term "eddic" is a misnomer: Most of these poems are in a single manuscript, and when the learned bishop Brynjólfur Sveinsson first saw this manuscript in the seventeenth century, he perceived a similarity to the book called Edda by Snorri Sturluson and imagined that this manuscript, another "Edda," had been composed by Sæmund Sigfússon the Learned, a priest who flourished in the years around 1100

Thou hast thy calling to some palace-floor, Most gracious singer of high poems! where The dancers will break footing, from the care Of watching up thy pregnant lips for more.

On love, we harvest the infinite poems of the soul .

All those years and their moments— Crackling bacon, slamming car doors, Poems tried out on friends, Will be one more archive, One more shaky text.

It's a beautiful universe... wondrous and the more exciting because no one has written plays and poems and built sculptures to indicate the structure of desire I negotiate every day as I move about in it.

The poems ... are moments when I had the intensity to see, and the energy to build, some careful analog that completed the seeing. ... All I have been left is the exhausting habit of trying to tack up the slack in my life with words.

From half-dark to half-dark, I read autumn poems in spring. Buson writes about stepping on his dead wife's comb in their dark bedroom. In fact, she outlived him by thirty-one years. The chill from that comb, and the snap of eros and solitude and imagining, all in flower.

These are the poems of a traveler and a lover who feels both the terror of time passing and the consolation of eternity. From such tension spring lovely poetic objects, ready for intelligent use.

I don't want my poems to be sentimental, though I do acknowledge that sentiment is probably rather under-reported in a lot of people's feelings a lot of the time.

With time some poems just fall by the wayside. Other poems get better over time with revision, revision, revision. My ladybug poem took 10 minutes to write but was 10 years in the making.

I think of my poems as personal and public at the same time. You could say they serve as psychological overlays. One fits on top of the other, and hopefully there's an ongoing evolution of clarity.

I greeted his posting with the sort of enthusiasm that would have followed the news that King Herod had been chosen to supervise the crèche. Very early on in our working relationship I ventured the notion - on air - that clouds were, if you like, poems in the sky, and he greeted this outbreak of loveliness with spluttering disbelief. here, I felt, was a singularly crass man.

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.

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

I write the poems first, with only a few exceptions for odd reasons, where I'm given the illustration first.

My childhood was all about going to church, singing in church. And later on, after I got a little older, my mother taught me how to do poems for Easter and Mother's Day, recitals and so on. I got attached to that, so as I got older and older, I began to recite poetry.

Some dreams, some poems, some musical phrases, some pictures, wake feelings such as one never had before, new in colour and form—spiritual sensations, as it were, hitherto unproved

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

I have a little tiny Emily Dickinson so big that I carry in my pocket everywhere. And you just read three poems of Emily. She is so brave. She is so strong. She is such a sexy, passionate, little woman. I feel better.