Quotes About Art

No good poem, however confessional it may be, is just a self-expression. Who on earth would claim that the pearl expresses the oyster?

Usually, a number of events will be going on around me to start me on a book. What I mean is, I will have read a poem or seen a picture that is lingering in my mind.

There is something about a bureaucrat that does not like a poem.

The difference between 'lighght' and another type of poem with more words is that it doesn't have a reading process. Even a five-word poem has a beginning, middle, and end. A one-word poem doesn't. You can see it all at once. It's instant.

Art is not the kind of thing where you get what you put into it all the time. So I learned to not expect anything other than the sort of joy of having a poem in front of me.

The poem is never complete in the mind. It emerges, and then it's like an act of unveiling. The unveiling is the longest and most difficult part of it.

Whether you listen to a piece of music, or a poem, or look at a picture or a jug, or a piece of sculpture, what matters about it is not what it has in common with others of its kind, but what is singularly its own.

The paintings may communicate even better because people are lazy and they can look at a painting with less effort than they can read a poem.

I see the shape of the poem before I start writing, and the writing is just the process of arriving at the shape.

With me it's the whole thing, it's the conceit, the idea, what the poem is saying. And it goes on just as long as is necessary to say what needs to be said.

At the point where I'm trying to force something and it's not happening, and I'm getting frustrated with, say, writing a poem, I can go and pick up the brushes and start painting. At the point where the painting seems to not be going anywhere, I go and pick up the guitar.

Manipulating shadows and tonality is like writing music or a poem.

For me a poem has to sing out of itself and the lilt of it carries the magic.

What is the poem, after it is written? That is the question. Not where it came from or why.

For me, a poem is an opportunity to kind of interrogate myself a little bit.

The only real evidence that any critic may bring before his gaze is the finished poem.

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.

The beautiful feeling after writing a poem is on the whole better even than after sex, and that's saying a lot.

When I see great boxers, it's like reading a wonderful poem.

To sing a song is quite different than to write a poem. I'm not and never will be a novelist, but to write a novel is not the same thing as writing a play. There is a difference in form, but essentially what you're after is the same thing.

I was actually a poetry major in college before I punted and decided to become a theater major. I wrote the poem that we put on the sauerkraut boxes in the style of Elling.

You can say a lot more with a poem than you can with a song, but with a song you can really be more powerful with it. You can express it a lot more powerfully.

When I write a poem, I go into a state of self-forgetfulness, and something higher takes over; I like to call it my best self.