Poems Quotes

Keats writes better about poems than anybody I’ve ever read. The things that he says about what he wants his own poems to be are the ideals that I share.

The poets who have written the best poems about war seem to be the poets whose countries have experienced an invasion or vicious dictatorships.

I hadn’t published a book of poetry in over a decade because I’ve been very ill. As I got better and started to write, I said, ‘Wow, even as an old woman, I could have a selected book of poems.’

I was shy at school, but not at home. We had a boiler that had tiles around it, so if my sister and I got new shoes we’d do a little tap dance on the tiles. I also wrote poems but would read them from behind a curtain.

Like so many aspiring writers who still have boxes of things they’ve written in their parents’ houses, I filled notebooks with half-finished poems and stories and first paragraphs of novels that never got written.

I wrote poems. That is my work. I am convinced… I believe that what I wrote will be useful to people not only now but in future generations.

I have to make myself write, sometimes. In the space between poems, you somehow forget how to do it, where to begin. It was good to be task – based for a while. I just came downstairs each day, picked the one I was going to do that day, and wrote.

I think a good story can do as much as a novel; not the exact same thing, of course, but just as much artistically. They’re different beasts, but to tackle an expansive country like the United States, you’re either going to write a big novel, or go in to various points on the map and write stories or poems.

I have a little tiny Emily Dickinson so big that I carry in my pocket everywhere. And you just read three poems of Emily. She is so brave. She is so strong. She is such a sexy, passionate, little woman. I feel better.

Poems that come swiftly are usually the ones that you keep.

I was in Paris at an English-language bookstore. I picked up a volume of Dickinson’s poetry. I came back to my hotel, read 2,000 of her poems and immediately began composing in my head. I wrote down the melodies even before I got to a piano.

When American poet Alice Notley was very young, she used to sit in front of the radio and just listen. When she got older, she began to hear words and songs in her head everywhere she went – songs she loved, like ‘Begin the Beguine’ by Cole Porter, and her own words that sometimes tumbled out into poems.

All that I’ve done in my life thus far, all the poems and all the pictures, are not so much an intermingling of my life with art but a divine accident.

In a long poem or a sequence of poems, you’re trying to formalize your obsessions and give them a shape and a name. The key is to realize if the connections you are making are ones with resonance.

The first glimpse that we have of the notions which the Greeks possessed of the shape and the inhabitants of the earth is afforded by the poems passing under the name of Homer.

When I ventured into writing at the age of 17, I wanted to be a good and successful writer. I just wanted to write good stuff – poems, prose, stories, essays, everything.

Well, it’s a badge of honour for any self-respecting poet to be criticized by Auberon Waugh. But in a lot of ways my poems are very conventional, and it’s no big deal for me to write a poem in either free verse or strict form; modern poets can, and do, do both.

Love, like poems, knows no boundaries. Religions, race, distance not even age can restrict someone from falling in love.

You see, the patience of an audience is very short, particularly with a non-entity. You’re an intruder, and you must make them laugh within three or four seconds. My poems fit the requirements, and I’m always thinking up new ones.

It seems like I’ve been writing since birth! I started writing poems before I got to school. I wrote the class musical in first grade – both words and music. It was about a bunch of vegetables who got together in a salad. I played the chief carrot!

People who attack biography choose as their models vulgar and offensive biography. You could equally attack novels or poems by choosing bad poems or novels.

Rhyme is a mnemonic device, an aid to the memory. And some poems are themselves mnemonics, that is to say, the whole purpose of the poem is to enable us to remember some information.

Once I planned to write a book of poems entirely about the things in my pocket. But I found it would be too long; and the age of the great epics is past.

I would like to talk about poems like I talk about football.

I began writing poems when I was about eight, with a heavy assist from my mother. She read me Arthur Waley’s translations and Whitman and Robinson Jeffers, who have been lifelong influences on me. My father read Keats to me, and then he read more Keats while I was lying on the sofa struggling with asthma.

The best public poems aren’t necessarily those that go at the subject like a bull at a gate.

When I was a young man, I understood that poetry was two things – it was difficult to understand, but you could understand that the poet was miserable. So for a while there, I wrote poems that were hard to understand, even by me, but gave off whiffs of misery.

I always wrote little things when I was younger. My first opus was a book of poems put down in a spiral notebook at five or six, handsomely accompanied by crayon illustrations.

Everybody has ideas. The vital question is, what do you do with them? My rock musician sons shape their ideas into music. My sister takes her ideas and fashions them into poems. My brother uses his ideas to help him understand science. I take my ideas and turn them into stories.

The poems were the only thing I wrote that was not for everyone else. Then my editors at Penguin, who were also friends and had seen several of them, aggressively urged me to do a book. Editors can be aggressive, especially after drinks. That’s how ‘Beyond This Dark House’ appeared.

The years rolled their brutal course down the hill of time. Still poor, my clothes still smelling of the horse barn, still writing those doubtful poems where too much emotion clashed with too many words.

My first collection of poems was published by Bloodaxe Books, which was then a very new imprint.

The first poems I knew were nursery rhymes, and before I could read them for myself, I had come to love just the words of them, the words alone.

It’s hard to write haiku. I write long, silly Indian poems.

My first book was an adult novel, ‘Down Among the Gods,’ published by Virago, and I’ve written poems as well, a slim volume of poetry.

I believe in rooting poems in actual places, even if you move into some other extraordinary realm.

I can’t understand these chaps who go round American universities explaining how they write poems: It’s like going round explaining how you sleep with your wife.

Some of us have been thinking and talking too long without doing anything. Poems are perfect; picketing, sometimes, is better.

I like poems you can tack all over with a hammer and there are no hollow places.

Though my poems are about evenly split between traditionally formal work that uses rhyme and meter and classical structure, and work that is freer, I feel that the music of language remains at the core of it all. Sound, rhythm, repetition, compression – these elements of my poetry are also elements of my prose.

Imagination makes us aware of limitless possibilities. How many of us haven’t pondered the concept of infinity or imagined the possibility of time travel? In one of her poems, Emily Bronte likens imagination to a constant companion, but I prefer to think of it as a built-in entertainment system.

The Hollywood movies are more like novels, and the kinds of films I make are more like poems.

Favorite poems are like favorite children. We definitely have them but we never tell as the others would have their feelings hurt.

Poems, unlike songs, are written to be read and, thus, come equipped with their own rhythms and melodies; they’re self-contained entities, the whole shebang.

The more I read my poems, the more I find out about them. I still read them with the same passion I felt when I wrote them as a young man.

My earlier poems were sadder than my poems are today, perhaps because I wrote them in confusion or when I was unhappy. But I am not a melancholy person, quite the contrary, no one enjoys laughing more than I do.

John Updike’s first published book was a collection of poems.

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.

For ‘King Cole’s American Salvage,’ I rode around in the wrecker with a local driver and watched him deal with customers and hook up the cars. I watched the guy who tore apart the cars in the junkyard. I also wrote poems about those guys. I loved hanging around the yard.

Most of the time, comparing printed song lyrics with poems is like comparing recipes with food: that’s to say, patently unfair.

Before I was ever a poet, my father was writing poems about me, so it was a turning of the tables when I became a poet and started answering, speaking back to his poems in ways that I had not before.

In history class, I wrote a poem, ‘The Royalists and the Roundheads.’ I would write poems about driftwood in art class and little stories about the sun, moon, and stars in science class. Since not many kids were writing in class, I got away with it.

Many poets write books. They’ll tell you: Well, I’ve got my next book, but there are two poems I need to write, one about x, one about y. This is a wonder to me.

My poems tend to have rhetorical structures; what I mean by that is they tend to have a beginning, a middle, and an end. There tends to be an opening, as if you were reading the opening chapter of a novel. They sound like I’m initiating something, or I’m making a move.

When we started reading books to Raffi, I included some Russian ones. A friend had handed down a beautiful book of Daniil Kharms poems for children; they were not nonsense verse, but they were pretty close, and Raffi enjoyed them.

As a reader, coming to my reading as a writer immersed in fairytales, I can’t help but notice in so many stories, plays, poems that I read, the sort of breadcrumbs of fairytale techniques, so I’m very excited when I notice that.

I really like Pat Parker. I really like Audre Lorde. I read a lot of the Beats when I was younger, so Diane di Prima, Gary Snyder. I’ve been discovering a lot more modern poems as well.

I’ve reached a point in life where it would be easy to let down my guard and write simple imagistic poems. But I don’t want to write poems that aren’t necessary. I want to write poems that matter, that have an interesting point of view.

I had always written. I had written stories and poems. Then I started writing plays.

Southern poets are still writing narrative poems, poems in forms, dramatic poems.

There’s one of my new poems actually – is a good example of where my poetry has ended up. My earlier river poetry was more like a cross between Shelley and Dylan Thomas.

In 1971, when I was 29, I wrote my first volume of poetry. I am a poet, and I have published four books of my poems.

My first book of poems was published privately in 1949. That was my mother. The book was ’25 Poems.’ It cost 200 dollars.

Often I find that poems predict what I’m going to do later in my own writing, and often I find that poems predict my life. So I think poetry is the most intense expression of feeling that we have.

One of the most famous poems I know by Maya Angelou is not ‘I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings,’ it’s the other one, ‘Still I Rise.’

I think the first little jolt I got was reading Gerard Manley Hopkins – I liked other poems… but Hopkins was kind of electric for me – he changed the rules with speech, and the whole intensity of the language was there and so on.

I’ve always wanted to write poems and nothing else.

Only truthful hands write true poems. I cannot see any basic difference between a handshake and a poem.

I always wrote poems when I was a little girl, and I loved hip hop music, and I kind of just started writing poems over beats, and that’s when I started rapping.

As a child, what captivated me was reading the poems myself and realizing that there was a world without material substance which was nevertheless as alive as any other.

After I’d produced about two dozen pen and ink drawings, one evening I decided that they needed poems to accompany them. I still have no idea where that notion came from, but it took me about two hours to produce verses for these creatures.

My earliest poems sing of the absolute necessity of allowing love to invade and pervade one’s life. That can make the miracle happen in reality. Try it.

I grew up in New York City. In elementary school, I was a charter member of the Scribble Scrabble Club, and in high school, my poems were published in an anthology of student poetry.

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

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.

The interesting thing is that you don’t often meet a poet who doesn’t have a sense of humour, and some of them do keep it out of their poems because they’re afraid of being seen as light versifiers.

Even though I was a reluctant reader in junior high and high school, I found myself writing poems in the back of class.

Poems in a way are spells against death. They are milestones, to see where you were then from where you are now. To perpetuate your feelings, to establish them. If you have in any way touched the central heart of mankind’s feelings, you’ll survive.

I usually do at least a dozen drafts and progressively make more-conscious decisions. Because I’ve always believed stories are closer to poems than novels, I spend a lot of time on the story’s larger rhythms, such as sentence and paragraph length, placement of flashbacks and dialogue.

I’m terrified of switching the computer on because there are so many poems.

Pretty much the day I stopped being laureate, the poems that had been few and far between came back to me, like birds in the evening nesting in a tree.

The best books of our times have included the three mature volumes of Philip Larkin. They’re very short books of poems, and very carefully arranged.

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

We read Robert Browning’s poetry. Here we needed no guidance from the professor: the poems themselves were enough.

Writers must… take care of the sensibility that houses the possibility of poems.

I like poems that are little games.

Throughout his career, W.G. Sebald wrote poems that were strikingly similar to his prose. His tone, in both genres, was always understated but possessed of a mournful grandeur.

The historical legacy of ‘The Best American Poetry’ is they’ve had very few editors who were not white. They’ve had very few instances where they’ve selected poems by non-white poets.

Poems, novels – these things belong to the nation, to the culture, and the people.

Poems are endlessly renewable resources. Whatever you bring to them, at whatever stage of life, gets mirrored back, refracted, reread in new ways.

The only difference between me and others is that they think they can change something with cute little poems, nice cards or embracing trees and being nice to little lapdogs.

I am a guest of the French language. My poems in French are born of my interaction with the French language, which is not the same as that of a French poet.

Heartbreak was the impetus to me writing poems and music in the first place. Over the years, I had my heart broken so badly that if I didn’t find a way to get all the pain out, I was going to lose my mind. I was crazy! Like, wanting to slash tires and smash car windows. Crazy! I was so hurt that I had to write.

I really just love reading. It’s my favorite thing, performing my poems live. Reading by reading, I just kind of follow my nose.

The poets, therefore, however much they adorned the gods in their poems, and amplified their exploits with the highest praises, yet very frequently confess that all things are held together and governed by one spirit or mind.

I came from a home full of the sounds of my parents performing poems or playing recordings of Robert Graves, WB Yeats and Dylan Thomas.

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

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.

What I wanted to do was use literature and different kinds of stories and poems as a springboard, tapping into the creativity of our teens – I wanted teenagers to come up with their own creative responses to literature – using books themselves as a starting point.

My poems tend to be more celebratory and lyrical, and the novels so far pretty dark. Poetry doesn’t seem to me to be an appropriate tool for exploring that.

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 admire Ginsberg as a poet, despite the fact that he seems not to know when he is being good and when he is bad. But he will last, or at least those poems will last.

Poems mesmerized me, and I felt better when I was writing them, or trying to – more in touch with something deep and dark within myself.

I have learned so much from working with other poets, travelling and reading with them, spending days discussing poems in progress. There is the sense that we are all, as writers, part of something which is more powerful than any of us.

I always knew that I was tremendously creative. I recited love poems, I wrote stories and I got excellent grades in every subject, except for maths.

I like the machinery of poems, especially when they have human warmth.

I would come to understand there is no poem separable from its source. I began to see that poems are not just an individual florescence. They are also a vast root system growing down into ideas and understandings. Almost unbidden, they tap into the history and evolution of art and language.

People called me Cilla when I was little because I was always singing and writing poems.

When I was in fourth grade, I started writing a lot of poetry, and eventually, someone in the church was like, ‘You should switch this over to rapping.’ I went home and did that – started putting my poems over rap.

My childhood was all about going to church, singing in church. And later on, after I got a little older, my mother taught me how to do poems for Easter and Mother’s Day, recitals and so on. I got attached to that, so as I got older and older, I began to recite poetry.

Poems evolve. I don’t feel like I choose them; they just come to me.

You litter poems with too much learning when you’re younger.

The idea of a pseudonym had been flitting around my brain for a long time, along with its cognate, disappearance. In the 1980s, I published some poems under a pen name in a literary magazine to see what it would feel like. It was fun. It was even a little thrilling.

I think poems belong as much in the news pages as the literary pages. A lot of people throw aside the literary pages! Whereas everybody looks at the news section.

I don’t expect you’ll hear me writing any poems to the greater glory of Ronald and Nancy Reagan.

I like poems that are complex.

My poems – I don’t even like the sound of that, in a way. Not that anyone else wrote them. But we know that only people who are really close to us care about our personal experience.

I started out writing poems before I figured to put melodies to them and play the guitar. Somewhere, there’s a book out there on all those early songs and poems. I hope no one ever finds it. I don’t think it’s my finest work.

It may be said that poems are in one way like icebergs: only about a third of their bulk appears above the surface of the page.

Poems, for me, begin as a social engagement. I want to establish a kind of sociability or even hospitality at the beginning of a poem. The title and the first few lines are a kind of welcome mat where I am inviting the reader inside.

If I were to die thinking that I’d written three poems that people might read after me, I would feel that I hadn’t lived in vain. Great poets might expect the whole body of their work, but most of us – well, I would settle for a handful.

The first thing I tried to do in the months after losing my mother was to write a poem. I found myself turning to poetry in the way so many people do – to make sense of losses. And I wrote pretty bad poems about it. But it did feel that the poem was the only place that could hold this grief.

Most poets are young simply because they have not been caught up. Show me an old poet, and I’ll show you, more often than not, either a madman or a master… it’s when you begin to lie to yourself in a poem in order simply to make a poem that you fail. That is why I do not rework poems.

I find a lot of poetry very disappointing, but I do have poets that I go back to. One book of poetry that I’d like to mention is ‘The Exchange’ by Sophie Cabot Black. Her poems are difficult without being too difficult.

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

I’ve been interested in LeRoi Jones/Amiri Baraka’s work for quite a while. My first introduction to LeRoi Jones was when my mother used to read me the ‘Dead Lecturer’ poems when I was a kid.

I studied poetry in college and for a year in an MFA program. As time went on, my poems got more and more complicated. What I was really trying to do was tell stories.

I really liked writing rhyming poems and plays.

My poems always begin with a metaphor, but my way into the metaphor may be a word, an image, even a sound. And I rarely know the nature of the metaphor when I begin to write, but there is an attentiveness that a writer develops, a sudden alertness that is much like the feel of a fish brushing against a hook.

When I go to the shore, I take along the poems of Pablo Neruda. I suppose it’s because the poems are simultaneously lush and ripe and kind of lazy, yet throbbing with life – like summer itself.

If I were assigned poems I suppose I’d write more of them but it is entirely voluntary and for the most part ignored in the market sense of the word so the language to me is most intimate, most important, most sublime and most satisfying when it gets done.

Don’t be too harsh to these poems until they’re typed. I always think typescript lends some sort of certainty: at least, if the things are bad then, they appear to be bad with conviction.

Of the individual poems, some are more lyric and some are more descriptive or narrative. Each poem is fixed in a moment. All those moments written or read together take on the movement and architecture of a narrative.

One of my graduate school professors, to whom I started sending poems when I started writing again after a 10-year hiatus, suggested I prepare a book manuscript which he could send to publishers for me.

I’ve not been a prolific poet, and it always seemed to me to be a bad idea to feel that you had to produce in order to get… credits. Production of a collection of poems every three years or every five years, or whatever, looks good, on paper. But it might not be good; it might be writing on a kind of automatic pilot.

I have always thought of poems as stepping stones in one’s own sense of oneself. Every now and again, you write a poem that gives you self-respect and steadies your going a little bit farther out in the stream. At the same time, you have to conjure the next stepping stone because the stream, we hope, keeps flowing.

I’m a great believer in poetry out of the classroom, in public places, on subways, trains, on cocktail napkins. I’d rather have my poems on the subway than around the seminar table at an MFA program.

I play with language a great deal in my poems, and I enjoy that. I try to condense language, that is, I try to express complicated but I hope real emotions as simply as possible. But that doesn’t mean the poems are simple, just that they are as truthful as I can make them.

I think of something quite different from a snapshot. I know of a lot of poems, some very fine ones, that are like snapshots, but I’m more interested in poetry that is like an endless film, long stories, things that weave together many different strands, like a big piece of cloth, not like a photograph.

By the age of nine, I had a thorough knowledge of contemporary Polish literature as well as of foreign literature in Polish translation, and I began to write poems in honour of a lady of thirty years. Naturally, she knew nothing about them.

I used to get in trouble a lot in school because I would write very naughty stories and poems in class.

However, I began to submit poems to British magazines, and some were accepted. It was a great moment to see my first poems published. It felt like entering a tradition.

Poems are ideally suited, in some ways, to social media because they pack so much meaning into so little language.

You don’t help people in your poems. I’ve been trying to help people all my life – that’s my trouble.

I have a vast ‘bone pile’ of stillborn or abandoned poems along with jottings and wisps from the great beyond that I tend to scan. Sometimes that leads somewhere, and sometimes the Muse is just on sabbatical.

My horizon on humanity is enlarged by reading the writers of poems, seeing a painting, listening to some music, some opera, which has nothing at all to do with a volatile human condition or struggle or whatever. It enriches me as a human being.

Indeed, I would venture to guess that Anon, who wrote so many poems without signing them, was often a woman.

Spring has returned. The Earth is like a child that knows poems.

In other words the pictures are in a kind of relationship with each other which is touching only at points rather than pictures being illustrations of poems or poems extrapolations of the pictures.

I liked the kid who wrote me that he had to do a term paper on a modern poet and he was doing me because, though they say you have to read poems twice, he found he could handle mine in one try.

I was taught that poems don’t end, they just kind of stop. There’s never an ending to a poem; it’s a continuation for later. When I write, I write for me, and I write in poetic form.

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

I write… sonnets… and writing sonnets is boring. You have to find rhymes; you have to write hendecasyllables; so after a while, I get bored and my drawer is overflowing with unfinished short poems.

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.

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

I am a writer… I am a genius of a writer; I have it in me. I am writing the best poems of my life; they will make my name.

When I was a kid, a pickleball hit me in the back of the head, and I had memory problems. I was in a boarding school and the nuns gave me poems to remember to try and get the memory going again.

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

In all the poems I’ve written I’ve not really engaged in politics, and when I’ve found myself moving in that direction I’ve always stopped myself.

I like Beethoven, especially the poems.

A lot of my activity in the theatre, and even in writing poems, was a kind of retrospective aggro on the English teacher who wouldn’t allow me to read poetry aloud.

The reason a poet is a poet is to write poems, not to advertise himself as a poet.

I’m very aware of the presence of a reader, and that probably is a reaction against a lot of poems that I do read which seem oblivious to my presence as a reader.

I used to carry about with me a German map-case filled with poems.

How do poems grow? They grow out of your life.

What I’m fighting for now in my work… for an expression relevant to all manner of blacks, poems I could take into a tavern, into the street, into the halls of a housing project.

Poems are a form of music, and language just happens to be our instrument – language and breath.

I believed in fictional characters as if they were a part of real life. Poetry was important, too. My parents had memorized poems from their days attending school in New York City and loved reciting them. We all enjoyed listening to these poems and to music as well.

My father read poetry to me, encouraged me to memorize poems. But the writing of it was quite a different thing.

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

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.

There are certain functions that a writer has to do. In a time of crisis, it is great to have heroic poems, as it was in the Irish Revolution. It’s great to have great songs, because people need something to sing when they are marching. That’s OK, but it should be on the side. It’s not the ultimate thing.

Why does one always ask a writer why they stopped? I am sure everyone finds in any drawer a few dear poems.

I love my funny poems, but I’d rather break your heart. And if I can do both in the same poem, that’s the best.

I think of my poems as personal and public at the same time. You could say they serve as psychological overlays. One fits on top of the other, and hopefully there’s an ongoing evolution of clarity.

I would venture to guess that Anon, who wrote so many poems without signing them, was often a woman.

Attempts to put my poems to music have had disastrous results in all cases. And the poem, if it’s written with the ear, already has been set to its own verbal music as it was composed.

I write almost everything, actually. Songs, poems, stories. And stories out of every genre, too.

Short stories and poems are an intense burst of emotions.

I still read Donne, particularly his love poems.

During the Gulf War, I remember two little third grade girls saying to me – after I read them some poems by writers in Iraq – ‘You know, we never thought about there being children in Iraq before.’ And I thought, ‘Well those poems did their job, because now they’ll think about everything a little bit differently.’

These poems, with all their crudities, doubts, and confusions, are written for the love of Man and in praise of God, and I’d be a damn’ fool if they weren’t.

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

Literary generations come and go, and each generation passeth away and is heard of no more. In the end, simply the making itself – of poems and stories and essays – delivers the only reward a writer can be sure of. And, perhaps, the only one that matters.

There’s not too much difference between writing a picture book and writing a collection of a hundred poems or so, except that the bigger books take a lot longer to do.

My wife, Keisha, came home once, and I had these violinists playing for her, and I’d prepared dinner for her, and I write poems. She’s pretty amazing, so I like to celebrate that. She’s really taught me how to celebrate life; that’s something I’ve learned.

When somebody’s in love with you, they think it’s amazing you’ve written them a poem, and when they don’t love you anymore, they hate those poems. They wish those poems would go away.

Sometimes I write quickly, sometimes I spend several weeks on a single poem. I would really love for readers not to be able to guess which of the poems took so much work!

I’ve always thought my poems told stories.

I’ve said what I’m prepared to say in my poems, and then journalists think that you’re going to tell them a whole lot more.

You must understand the whole of life, not just one little part of it. That is why you must read, that is why you must look at the skies, that is why you must sing and dance, and write poems and suffer and understand, for all that is life.

I wrote two poems about the ’81 uprisings: ‘Di Great Insohreckshan’ and ‘Mekin Histri.’ I wrote those two poems from the perspective of those who had taken part in the Brixton riots. The tone of the poem is celebratory because I wanted to capture the mood of exhilaration felt by black people at the time.

I don’t want my poems to be sentimental, though I do acknowledge that sentiment is probably rather under-reported in a lot of people’s feelings a lot of the time.

No one will ever know how many novels, poems, analyses, confessions, sufferings and joys have been piled up on this continent called Love, without it ever having turned out to be totally investigated.

I have these rhyme-based ideas because I love Julia Donaldson. ‘The Snail and the Whale’ is one of the most beautiful poems, and I feel like I could do that.

I have hundreds of poems memorized. Mostly by others, but also my own. I use the poems when I lead retreats for management groups on topics like creating teams, or coming up with a more entrepreneurial system, or creating more excitement.

I learned to play guitar at a young age and converted poems and stuff that I had written to songs.

The Christopher Robin who appears in so many of the poems is not always me. This was where my name, so totally useless to me personally, came into its own: it was a wonderful name for writing poetry round.

Sometimes, for me, lyrics are derived from poems that I’m working on, and they kind of cross back and forth between the two.

I think of myself as a writer who photographs. Images, for me, can be considered poems, short stories or essays. And I’ve always thought the best place for my photographs was inside books of my own creation.

Every so often I find some poems that are too good for the readers of The Atlantic because they are a little too involved with the nature of poetry, as such.

My favorite poets may not be your bread and butter. I have more favorite poems than favorite poets.

‘A collected poems’ is either a gravestone or a testimonial to survival.

A blend of fact and fiction has been used in various forms since the dawn of creative writing, starting with sagas and epic poems.

I don’t write poems. I don’t give flowers to girls… yet.

In our period, they say there is free speech. They say there is no penalty for poets, There is no penalty for writing poems. They say this. This is the penalty.

A lot of young poets today, from what I’ve heard and experienced, can’t get their heads past George W. Bush, and I’ve heard so many poems about this democracy and this era of politics that I’m kind of bored by it.

In 1977, I wrote a series of poems about a character, Black Bart, a former cattle rustler-turned-alchemist. A good friend, Claude Purdy, who is a stage director, suggested I turn the poems into a play.

I started writing when I was in school. I wrote essays and in my teen years I used to write sorrowful sad stories and poems as you do at the age.

I’ve always felt that poetry was particularly erotic, more than prose was… I say that you read poems not with your eyes and not with your ears, but with your mouth. You taste it.

With fiction, I tend to get to my desk and start writing. Poetry I write in my head, often while walking, so that my poems have an organic quality, hopefully.

One Christmas I had no money, and so I went home and just, like, wrote a poem; I mean, I didn’t write them, but I just handed out poems as Christmas presents. Like, ‘Here’s a Pablo Neruda poem that really made me think of you.’

I had written here and there about my mother in my poems. There are poems for her in my first and second books.

The way a small child might dream of visiting Disneyland, I dreamed of writing books. Never did I think my poems would become that.

Since the age of 11, I have loved writing poems and fragments from my life.

As far as I was concerned, it was the absence of women in the poetic tradition which allowed women in the poems to be simplified. The voice of a woman poet would, I was sure, have precluded such distortion. It did not exist.

I am increasingly attracted to restricting possibility in the poem by inflicting a form upon yourself. Once you impose some formal pattern on yourself, then the poem is pushing back. I think good poems are often the result of that kind of wrestling with the form.

So many poems you go into and come up empty.

Our poems will have failed if our readers are not brought by them beyond the poems.

I would rather write poems than prose, any day, any place. Yet each has its own force.

I don’t think of poetry as a ‘rational’ activity but as an aural one. My poems usually begin with words or phrases which appeal more because of their sound than their meaning, and the movement and phrasing of a poem are very important to me.

Hmmm. I think a lot of people can write poems that are howls of anguish. I think I’ve probably written such things and then torn them up.

I think my poems are slightly underrated by the word ‘accessible.’

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.

I’m happy to stick with my persona. There are themes of love lost and love regained, but the main themes of all poems are basically love and death, and that seems to be the message of poetry.

I’m trying to make the poems as musical as I can – from the inception. So that whether they’re read on the page, or people read them aloud, or I read them aloud, the musicality will be kind of a given.

We all write poems; it is simply that poets are the ones who write in words.

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

I started writing after the death of my grandfather – memories, poems, etc. It was very personal; for years I did not share my writing with anyone.

If I weren’t musical, then I would have just published a book, you know? But I’m lucky enough to play piano, and so I use piano to convert my poems.

To realise belatedly that there are Swahili epic poems which rival their European equivalents for sweep and power has been exciting.

I came from a very musical family, so I grew up singing karaoke with the family. My family said ‘do this’ and brought me to singing lessons. I had always been writing poems and songs.

I’m trying to write poems that involve beginning at a known place, and ending up at a slightly different place. I’m trying to take a little journey from one place to another, and it’s usually from a realistic place, to a place in the imagination.

I started writing as a child. But I didn’t think of myself actually writing until I was in college. And I had gone to Africa as a sophomore or something – no, maybe junior – and wrote a book of poems. And that was my beginning. I published that book.

Today the U.S. is farther from being nourished by poetry than it was a hundred years ago, when books of poems were best-sellers.

I like to read a lot of books and poems. Even though poems are short, I enjoy the emotions that come with them.

On July 26, 1916, I announced to all my friends in America that from now on I resolved to write no more poems in the classical language, and to begin my experiments in writing poetry in the so-called vulgar tongue of the people.