Quotes About Reflection

My poems were just kind of all over the place. They had no focus, no location, nothing. Kind of a series of images that could have been set anywhere. A lot of the poems were just exercises for myself.

There are different gradations of personhood in different poems. Some of them seem far away from me and some up close, and the up-close ones generally don't say what I want them to say. And that's true of the persona in the poem who's lamenting this as a fact of a certain stage of life. But it's also true of me as me.

My stories are sometimes closer to poems or meditations, but often there is at least a little narrative in them.

I do think that all of us think in poems.

I've had journals ever since I was really little. Sometimes I write poems and stuff, but for the most part I write down what happens to me during the day that I don't want to forget. So I have books filled with little things like that.

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.

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

My poems are always about my life in one way or another.

Starting after 60, I thought, 'I'm not going to be able to write a book of poems on the 70s. It's going to be all moans and groans and complaints, and what is there to laugh about?' But I found plenty to laugh about.

That sense of mystery, but also of revelation, is what I turn to poems for. They're able to embody experience. We need more and more of that.

I write poems.

I read Rumi, the 13th-century Persian poet, every day.

And muse on Nature with a poet's eye.

I am not less poet; I am more conscious of all that I am, am not, and might become.

For the poet the credo or doctrine is not the point of arrival but is, on the contrary, the point of departure for the metaphysical journey.

In a way you can feel that the poet actually is looking over your shoulder, and you say to yourself, now, how would this go for him? Would this do or not?

I shall try to write a poem that is about the moment but doesn't betray things that are true to me as a poet.

Paul Lisicky, in his new memoir, 'The Narrow Door,' describes losing his old friend, the novelist Denise Gess, and his husband, the acclaimed poet and memoirist Mark Doty, within a year of each other: Gess to cancer, at the age of 57, and Doty to another man.

I really wanted to be a poet - until I realized that I really didn't have what it took to be a poet.

The eye is the notebook of the poet.

For sure I once thought of myself as the poet who would save the ordinary from oblivion.

I never thought of myself as a New York poet or as an American poet.

But I'm too old to be written about as a young poet.