Poem Quotes - page 20

It is even in prose, I am a real poet. My poem is finished and I haven't mentioned orange yet It's twelve poems, I call it oranges. (Frank O'Hara)
...his book, Orpheus, or the Way to a Death Mask, of which he had said that he regretted not having written it as a poem. And with dream-awakened eyes she saw all the beauty around her, saw the sea, felt the sun, and knew: she had to vanish for a while from the human plane and make every sacrifice in order to create her world anew out of the depths. View quote
Charlotte Salomon
I think that there are fiction writers for whom that works well. I could never do it. I feel as if, by the time I see that it's a poem, it's almost written in my head somewhere. View quote
Sharon Olds
Because a poem is not written while running or while answering the phone. It's written in whatever minutes one has. Sometimes you have half an hour. View quote
Sharon Olds
Reading a poem in translation is like kissing a woman through a veil. View quote
Anne Michaels
I like to know that when I'm 90 years old, I'm going to be able to look at a song or poem I wrote and say, 'Wow! I remember I was so crazy about this person,' or 'I remember what that day felt like.' View quote
Camila Cabello
In a funny way, poems are suited to modern life. They're short, they're intense. Nobody has time to read a 700-page book. People read magazines, and a poem takes less time than an article. View quote
Caroline Kennedy
One of my favorite passages in 'Leaves of Grass,' that breathless, exuberant poem so rich and full of innocence and joy and generosity and compassion, is 'Mannahatta.' View quote
Cathleen Schine
My favourite poem is called 'Roots and Wings' - it's a very moving poem about how if you've got real roots you can fly. View quote
David Miliband
A good poem looks life straight in the face, unflinching, sincere, equal to revelation through loss or gain. View quote
David Whyte
Is it possible to write a poem or are these words just screams of outlaws exiled to the desert? (Dejan Stojanovic)
Someone told me just recently that poets are eulogists. It's their job, to eulogize. I didn't know that, but it makes sense. Because in almost every poem of mine there is a loss. View quote
Dan Quisenberry
Elizabeth Barrett Browning could write a poem two pages long. Could she have brought it to a music publisher? View quote
Dorothy Fields
Poetry is a lousy form of activism; it doesn't really change much. And maybe we can point to one or two historical times when a poem has started a revolution or a rebellion or an uprising, but it doesn't happen that often, and if you put the number of poems next to the number of political acts, it would be pretty slim. View quote
Daphne Gottlieb
In high school I was very much involved in poetry. You cannot read a poem quickly. There's too much going on there. There are rhythms and alliterations. You have to read poetry slow, slow, slow to absorb it all. View quote
Eugene H. Peterson
The idea of a poem as a message in a bottle means that it's sent out towards some future reader, and the reader who opens that bottle becomes the addressee of the literary text. View quote
Edward Hirsch
The idea of how to read a poem is based on the idea that poetry needs you as a reader. That the experience of poetry, the meaning in poetry, is a kind of circuit that takes place between a poet, a poem and a reader, and that meaning doesn't exist or inhere in poems alone. View quote
Edward Hirsch
I have never written a play, a story, a poem, or my one film - anything - unless something was troubling me enough, wrecking me, in fact, to drive me back into the absurdity of writing. I do not enjoy writing. View quote
Israel Horovitz
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. View quote
James Laughlin
Of course a poem is a two-way street. No poem is any good if it doesn't suggest to the reader things from his own mind and recollection that he will read into it, and will add to what the poet has suggested. But I do think poetry readings are very important. View quote
James Laughlin
In the past I have declined to comment on my own work: because, it seems to me, a poem is what it is; because a poem is itself a definition, and to try to redefine it is to be apt to falsify it; and because the author is the person least able to consider his work objectively. (James Schuyler)
It seems to me that readers sometimes make the genesis of a poem more mysterious than it is (by that I perhaps mean, think of it as something outside their own experience). View quote
James Schuyler
There's no artist in this world that doesn't enjoy the dream that if they have bad reviews now, the story of Keats can redeem them, in their fantasy or imagination, in the future. I think Keats' poem 'Endymion' is a really difficult poem, and I'm not surprised that a lot of people pulled it apart in a way. View quote
Jane Campion
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. View quote
Jane Hirshfield
One breath taken completely; one poem, fully written, fully read - in such a moment, anything can happen. View quote
Jane Hirshfield