Quotes About Poetry

I was very committed to the process of composing, working at poems, putting things together and taking them apart like some kind of experimental filmmaker.

Poetry comes with anger, hunger and dismay; it does not often visit groups of citizens sitting down to be literary together, and would appal them if it did.

Every authentic poem contributes to the labour of poetry... to bring together what life has separated or violence has torn apart.

I like the way words go together and I like the gamesmanship of writing poetry. It is such a challenge.

One day I am going to share the sort of love with a man that poets write of.

Maybe poetry is the only way we can get near the truth of God.… And when the metaphors fail, we think it's God who's failed us!

Ah, Sofia, darlin'! On my best days, I believe in Him with all my heart. And on your worst days? she had asked that night. Even if it's only poetry, it's poetry to live by, Sofia--poetry to die for. . .

On my best days, I believe in Him with all my heart. And on your worst days? she had asked that night. Even if it's only poetry, it's poetry to live by, Sofia -- poetry to die for, he told her with quiet conviction.

it was dawning on me how uphill a poet's path was, and I confessed to her that if I had to be the choice between being happy or being a poet, I'd choose to be happy.

Together we read Keats's letters to his lost beloved about how the stitches on a cap she made him went through him like a spear. I lace my fingers with his. The average non-poetry devotee may think the intensity around this stuff off-kilter at the least, but for us, it's like digging our hands together into a secret vat of pearls. In that realm only we are rich as any royalty.

I was miserable, of course, for I was seventeen, and so I swung into action and wrote a poem, and it was miserable, for that's how I thought poetry worked: you digested experience and shat literature. —William Matthews, "Mingus at the Showplace

Words would define me, govern and determine me. Words warranted my devotion - not drugs, not boys. That's why I clung to the myth that poetry could somehow magically still my scrambled innards.

At the poetry readings Warren hosts for his job every few weeks, I swill plastic cups of vinegary white wine and yammer like somebody pulled a string on my neck till the library lights get turned off. After one such event, Warren drives home with his jawline flexing. What? What's the matter? I ask. Do you have to stay till the last drop is drunk? he says. His sole mention of my drinking, as I recall.

Maybe the girls in my gym class had been right all along, and poetry was a trick on smart people—a bunch of hooey, fawned over by whining fops of the most stick-up-the-ass variety.

I could not be a poet without the natural world. Someone else could. But not me. For me the door to the woods is the door to the temple.

The poet must not only write the poem but must scrutinize the world intensely, or anyway that part of the world he or she has taken for subject. If the poem is thin, it is likely so not because the poet does not know enough words, but because he or she has not stood long enough among the flowers--has not seen them in any fresh, exciting, and valid way.

Poetry is a life-cherishing force. For poems are not words, after all, but fires for the cold, ropes let down to the lost, something as necessary as bread in the pockets of the hungry. Yes indeed.

Little Crazy Love Song" I don't want eventual, I want soon. It's 5 a.m. It's noon. It's dusk falling to dark. I listen to music. I eat up a few wild poems while time creeps along as though it's got all day. This is what I have. The dull hangover of waiting, the blush of my heart on the damp grass, the flower-faced moon. A gull broods on the shore where a moment ago there were two. Softly my right hand fondles my left hand as though it were you.

Poems arrive ready to begin. Poets are only the transportation.

The language of the poem is the language of particulars.

A poem should always have birds in it.

A Dream of Trees There is a thing in me that dreamed of trees, A quiet house, some green and modest acres A little way from every troubling town, A little way from factories, school, laments. I would have time, I thought, and time to spare, With only streams and birds for company, To build out of my life a few wild stanzas. And then it came to me, that so was death, A little way away from everywhere.

It is no use thinking that writing of poems – the actual writing – can accommodate itself to a social setting, even the most sympathetic social setting of a workshop composed of friends. It cannot. The work improves there and often the will to work gets valuable nourishment and ideas. But, for good reasons, the poem requires of the writer not society or instruction, but a patch of profound and unbroken solitude.

Poems must, of course, be written in emotional freedom. Moreover, poems are not language but the content of the language.