Quotes About Poetry

I want to just go to places where writers don't usually go, where people like me don't usually show up, and say, 'Here are some poems. Do they speak to you? What do you hear in them?'

I first came across 'The Lake Isle of Innisfree' in college, with other anthologized poems by Yeats.

'Finally' actually started out as a poem. I always wrote poetry, and pretty soon I figured out that if I could write poems, I could write songs.

Each poem in becoming generates the laws by which it is generated: extensions of the laws to other poems never completely take.

I've always thought my poems told stories.

I like poems that are complex.

I also write poems, so that is something that I really enjoy.

If I were brave enough to say so, I'd like to think that I had written some poems that people are not going to forget.

Many of my poems are not sexual.

I tend to like poems that engage me - that is to say, which do not bore me.

I didn't think about whether I was writing poems. I was thinking. And the more I was thinking, the more there was I didn't understand.

I want to write poems which are very emotional, but I would have some hesitation in saying I want to write poems which are sentimental.

I was writing notes, but not composing poems. The Hunter began to develop out of this fragmented process.

If you read Keats's poems, they're often full of doubts and anxieties. They can be quite tough.

The great poems are not about experience, but are the experience itself, felt in the body.

I started out in graduate school to be a fiction writer. I thought I wanted to write short stories. I started writing poems at that point only because a friend of mine dared me to write a poem. And I took the dare because I was convinced that I couldn't write a good poem... And then it actually wasn't so bad.

I wish I'd been better able to resist the sense of obligation to write some of the poems I did. It's in the nature of commissioned work to be written too much from the side of your mind that knows what it's doing, which dries up the poetry.

Garrison Keillor read several of my poems on 'The Writer's Almanac' and I've heard from listeners nationally and internationally. That's one of the great gifts of email.

Heartbreak was the impetus to me writing poems and music in the first place.

I think I felt at some point that I couldn't understand poetry or that it was beyond me or it didn't speak to my experience. I think that was because I hadn't yet found the right poems to invite me in.

So many poems you go into and come up empty.

All poems say the same thing, and each poem is unique. Each part reproduces the others, and each part is different.

Poems are perfect for something to listen to while you're walking around because they don't take very long.

It's difficult to learn poems off by heart that don't rhyme.