Poem Quotes - page 21

I feel like I am in the service of the poem. The poem isn't something I make. The poem is something I serve. (Jane Hirshfield)
One day, I just got up to read a poem and started singing. I looked around - the reaction was great. And I said, oh, boy. I like this. View quote
Jill Scott
Poe's saying that a long poem is a sequence of short ones is perfectly just. View quote
John Drinkwater
It really gets on my goat that people keep quoting Dorothea Mackellar's 'My Country' as proof that there is no such thing as climate change. A poem written more than 100 years ago by a homesick 19 year old versus an ever-increasing body of refereed scientific thought... hmm, hard to know which way to jump, really. View quote
Judy Horacek
I think you can have the greatest lyrics in the world and if it doesn't have the best tune in the world it will suck. I mean if the music wasn't important it would just be a poem. View quote
Julian Cope
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.' View quote
June Diane Raphael
For me a poem has to sing out of itself and the lilt of it carries the magic. View quote
James Broughton
Is there any purpose to translating poetry? A poem does not contain information of importance, like a signpost or a warning notice. View quote
James Buchan
A poem is like a score for the human voice. View quote
Li-Young Lee
What I responded to, on the page, was the way a poem could liberate, by means of a word's setting, through subtleties of timing, of pacing, that word's full and surprising range of meaning. It seemed to me that simple language best suited this enterprise. View quote
Louise Gluck
Every poem holds the unspeakable inside it. The unsayable... The thing that you can't really say because it's too complicated. It's too complex for us. Every poem has that silence deep in the center of it. (Marie Howe)
Many performance poets seem to believe that yelling a poem makes it comprehensible. They are wrong. View quote
Marilyn Nelson
The first poem I ever wrote, about loss, when I was 5 years old, expressed the themes of everything I would ever write. View quote
Marguerite Young
A poem can have an impact, but you can't expect an audience to understand all the nuances. View quote
Douglas Dunn
Reading a poem aloud to an audience is gestural as much as precise. View quote
Douglas Dunn
A poet's cultural baggage and erudition can interfere with a poem. View quote
Douglas Dunn
I am still interested in the long or serial poem, but have written a few smaller things. I may start sending to journals again in a year or so... that's about it. View quote
George Murray
I don't think there's anything wrong with someone having to read a poem twice. Or even a book. View quote
George Murray
The point of an experiment is not to arrive at a predetermined end point, to prove or disprove anything, but to deliver a poem that reveals much about the process taken. View quote
John Barton
I consider a poem to be a kind of experiment where a number of elements are brought together under test conditions to see how they will interact to create meaning or relevance. View quote
John Barton
Such a small, pure object a poem could be, made of nothing but air a tiny string of letters, maybe small enough to fit in the palm of your hand. But it could blow everybody's head off. (Mary Karr)
I did a short film at Outfest, 'Where Are the Dolls,' based on an Elizabeth Bishop poem done, where I play this woman who is sort of walking the streets and ends up alone dancing in a club. I have this hot and heavy scene with a very beautiful actress. It became very popular. View quote
Megan Follows
A thing may fail as a poem because it tries to do what a poem cannot do: it tries to become a treatise on cosmic truth... We can best be exact about the cosmic things - God and truth, beauty, eternity and love - by not talking directly about them. View quote
Miller Williams
Even though I am the daughter of a poet, and my stepmother is also a poet, growing up, I didn't think I could understand poetry; I didn't think that it had any relevance to my life, the feelings that I endured on a day-to-day basis, until I was introduced to the right poem. View quote
Natasha Trethewey
I think there is a poem out there for everyone, to be an entrance into the poetry and a relationship with it. View quote
Natasha Trethewey