Poem Quotes - page 25

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. (Joni Mitchell)
The first time I got onstage was when I was about 5 years old. It was at a church social, and I had a poem to recite. View quote
Willie Nelson
Does a poet create, originate, initiate the thing called a poem, or is his behavior merely the product of his genetic and environmental histories? View quote
B. F. Skinner
For me, a paragraph in a novel is a bit like a line in a poem. It has its own shape, its own music, its own integrity. View quote
Paul Auster
...I engage with poetry musically. I think I hear the music of the poem before I put words to it. The poem comes to me as it were a song more than a string of words or images. If I can't transport that musical quality to the poem, then the poem doesn't exist for me...”. View quote
Lucha Corpi
A play is like a free-flowing poem in some ways. The play, as you write, will tell you what the structure will be. But, sometimes you forget to ask those questions as you write and you end up spending a lot of time trying to find the essence of the play... View quote
Mando Alvarado
A great biography should, like the close of a great drama, leave behind it a feeling of serenity. We collect into a small bunch the flowers, the few flowers, which brought sweetness into a life, and present it as an offering to an accomplished destiny. It is the dying refrain of a completed song, the final verse of a finished poem. View quote
André Maurois
The true novelist is one who understands the work as a continuous poem, is a myth-maker, and the wonder of the art resides in the endless different ways of telling a story. View quote
Muriel Spark
Mark spoke like a poem and walked like a dance. View quote
Cassandra Clare
I see the shape of the poem before I start writing, and the writing is just the process of arriving at the shape. View quote
Carol Ann Duffy
I am always pleased to be asked to write a poem. (Carol Ann Duffy)
I always say that I'll have a go and see whether the poem works and if it does, then fine. View quote
Carol Ann Duffy
If I felt, in the event of a royal wedding, inspired to write about people coming together in marriage or civil partnership, I would just be grateful to have an idea for the poem. And if I didn't, I'd ignore it. View quote
Carol Ann Duffy
The poem is a form of texting... it's the original text. It's a perfecting of a feeling in language - it's a way of saying more with less, just as texting is. View quote
Carol Ann Duffy
We took Beowulf, the epic poem in Old English, and put it right together with John Gardner's contemporary retelling. If you bring it into today, we really feel that it has something very fresh to say now. View quote
Julie Taymor
I went to bed that night as usual, and slept, according to my wont, quite soundly. I awoke in the gray of the morning twilight; and as I lay waiting for the dawn, the long lines of the desired poem began to twine themselves in my mind. View quote
Julia Ward Howe
There are two versions to every poem – the crying version and the straight version. View quote
Galway Kinnell
Every poem is political. In poems not obviously political, the writer is trying to avoid something... View quote
Danez Smith
Of course, like the consciousness behind it, behind any art, a poem can be deep or shallow, glib or visionary, prescient or stuck in an already lagging trendiness. View quote
Adrienne Rich
A poem doesn't do everything for you. You are supposed to go on with your thinking. View quote
Gwendolyn Brooks
I pass you my Poem! - to tell you we are all vulnerable. (Gwendolyn Brooks)
I pass you my Poem. A poem doesn't do everything for you. You are supposed to go on with your thinking. You are supposed to enrich the other person's poem with your extensions, your uniquely personal understandings, thus making the poem serve you. View quote
Gwendolyn Brooks
Why do human beings need to confess? Maybe if you don't have that secret confession, you don't have a poem - don't even have a story. Don't have a writer. View quote
Ted Hughes
Every poem that works is like a metaphor of the whole mind writing, the solution of all the oppositions and imbalances going on at that time. View quote
Ted Hughes
I always tell students that writing a poem and publishing it are two quite separate things, and you should write what you have to write, and if you're afraid it's going to upset someone, don't publish it. View quote
Wendy Cope