Poem Quotes - page 6

I see the poem or the novel ending with an open door. (Michael Ondaatje)
When I have worries, fears or a love affair, I have the luck of being able to transform it into a poem. View quote
Mario Benedetti
I delay typing as long as possible. When I read a poem in longhand I'm hearing it, when in typescript I'm reading it. A poem can appear finished just because of the cleanness of the typescript. View quote
Mark Strand
Pain is filtered in a poem so that it becomes finally, in the end, pleasure. View quote
Mark Strand
You might as well ask an artist to explain his art, or ask a poet to explain his poem. It defeats the purpose. The meaning is only clear thorough the search. View quote
Rick Riordan
I had a dream, in 1985, I believe, when a friend I'd gone to school with was sick - one of the first people I knew who'd gotten the AIDS virus. I had a dream of him in his bedroom with an angel crashing through the ceiling. I wrote a poem called 'Angels in America.' I've never looked at the poem since the day I wrote it. View quote
Tony Kushner
The novel is born of disillusionment; the poem, of despair. View quote
Jose Bergamin
I pretty much drink a cup of coffee, write in my journal for a while, and then sit at a computer in my office and torture the keys. My one saving grace as a writer is that, if I'm having trouble with the novel I'm writing, I write something else, a poem or a short story. I try to avoid writer's block by always writing something. View quote
Jess Walter
A poet can feel free, in my estimation, to write a poem for himself. Or a painter can paint a painting for himself. You can write a short story for yourself. But for me, comedy by its nature is communal. If other people don't get it, I'm not sure why you are doing it. View quote
Keegan-Michael Key
I loved my friend He went away from me There's nothing more to say The poem ends, Soft as it began- I loved my friend. View quote
Langston Hughes
Ooh, it's too ­embarrassing to share my innermost romantic secrets - although I have written Danielle the odd poem. If anything they are more comedic than romantic. They used to be well ­received but that was before she started studying Shakespeare at drama college. Now I feel so ­inept. (Gary Lineker)
Laymen learn to read photographs the way they do headlines, skipping over them quickly to get the gist of what is being said. Photographers, on the other hand, study them with the care and attention to detail one might give to a difficult scientific paper or a complicated poem. View quote
Howard S. Becker
The poem is important, but not more than the people whose survival it serves... View quote
Wendell Berry
You should always be trying to write a poem you are unable to write, a poem you lack the technique, the language, the courage to achieve. Otherwise you're merely imitating yourself, going nowhere, because that's always easiest. View quote
John Berryman
My works really begin in a very simple way. Sometimes it's an image, and sometimes it's words I might write, like a fragment of a poem. View quote
Bill Viola
I've thought of the last line of some poems for years and tried them out, It wouldn't work because the last line was much too beautiful for the poem. View quote
Howard Nemerov
I've never read a political poem that's accomplished anything. Poetry makes things happen, but rarely what the poet wants. View quote
Howard Nemerov
I sometimes talk about the making of a poem within the poem. View quote
Howard Nemerov
Mostly the thought and the verse come inseparably. In my poem Poetics, it's as close as I come to telling how I do it. View quote
Howard Nemerov
It's possible, in a poem or short story, to write about commonplace things and objects using commonplace but precise language, and to endow those things-a chair, a window curtain, a fork, a stone, a woman's earring-with immense, even startling power. View quote
Raymond Carver
I was a better writer when I was teaching. I was constantly going over the basics and constantly reminding myself, as I reminded my students, what made a good story, a good poem. (Gil Scott-Heron)
Poems have a different music from ordinary language, and every poem has a different kind of music of necessity, and that's, in a way, the hardest thing about writing poetry is waiting for that music, and sometimes you never know if it's going to come. View quote
C.K. Williams
I believed that I wanted to be a poet, but deep down I just wanted to be a poem. View quote
Jaime Gil de Biedma
If I wrote in a sonnet form, I would be distorting. Or if I had some great new idea for line breaks and I used it in a poem, but it's really not right for that poem, but I wanted it, that would be distorting. View quote
Sharon Olds
This creature of the poem may assemble itself into a being with its own centrifugal force. View quote
Sharon Olds