Quotes About Reflection

I keep the drafts of each poem in color-coded folders. I pick up the folders according to how I feel about that color that day.

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.

Often people, when they're confronted with a poem, it's like someone who keep saying 'what is the meaning of this? What is the meaning of this?' And that dulls us to the other pleasures poetry offers.

I make a discovery in a poem as I write it.

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 wrote a staggeringly bad poem when I was 19 after a girlfriend dumped me. I seem to remember comparing her to a tarantula. It was all very E. J. Thribb of me.

I do read a poem almost every morning. Unless I'm really, really late, I have to get my poem in.

A perfect poem you can't pin down and say, 'This is exactly what it meant to me.' It's not a self-help manual.

The number of people who read a poem is not as important as how the poem affects those who read it.

For me, to have had an impact with anything that you've done, whether it's a painting, a photo, a poem, or something that you've created, just that experience is enormous. You don't get that all the time.

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

I have a favorite poem. From Rudyard Kipling. It's called 'L'Envoi.'

Poems are not read: they are reread. Reread the poem, then read between the lines, then look at it, then watch it, then peek at it: handle it like an object. Contemplate its shadows, angles and dimensions.

If someone is alone reading my poems, I hope it would be like reading someone's notebook. A record. Of a place, beauty, difficulty. A familiar daily struggle.

I learn a lot about my poems when I read them by the way people respond to them.

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

I write poems like some people sing in the bathroom.

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

You want a poem to unsettle something. There's a deep and interesting kind of troubling that poems do, which is to say, 'This is what you think you're certain of, and I'm going to show you how that's not enough. There's something more that might be even more rewarding if you're willing to let go of what you already know.'

My poems... the ones that start out as jokes become these big ponderous things and the ones that start out ponderous devolve into jokes.

There's so much to think about when you're becoming an adult, and there's so many great poems about that apprehension and excitement.

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

Yes, I do often write poems from the mind, but I hope I don't ignore feelings and emotions.

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.