Poem Quotes - page 7

I can't tell you where a poem comes from, what it is, or what it is for: nor can any other man. The reason I can't tell you is that the purpose of a poem is to go past telling, to be recognised by burning. (A. R. Ammons)
A poem generated by its own laws may be unrealized and bad in terms of so-called objective principles of taste, judgement, deduction. View quote
A. R. Ammons
Each poem in becoming generates the laws by which it is generated: extensions of the laws to other poems never completely take. View quote
A. R. Ammons
If a poem is each time new, then it is necessarily an act of discovery, a chance taken, a chance that may lead to fulfillment or disaster. View quote
A. R. Ammons
It is still true that it is easier to compose a poem in the form of a manual for adjusting a VCR than it is to write a piece using just tuning as a symphony. View quote
Brian Ferneyhough
Manipulating shadows and tonality is like writing music or a poem. View quote
Conrad Hall
When you know the lyrics to a tune, you have some kind of insight as to it's composition. If you don't understand what it's about, you're depriving yourself of being really able to communicate this poem. View quote
Dexter Gordon
I think I'm a very good reader of poetry, but obviously, like everybody, I have a set of criteria for reading poems, and I'm not shy about presenting them, so if people ask for my critical response to a poem, I tell them what works and why, and what doesn't work and why. View quote
Diane Wakoski
In one line of his poem he said good fences make good neighbors. I'd like to think that Alaska and British Columbia working together can prove that we can be pretty darned good neighbors without fences. View quote
Dan Miller
However, if a poem can be reduced to a prose sentence, there can't be much to it. View quote
James Schuyler
I do not usually revise much, though I often cut, particularly the end or toward the end of a poem. (James Schuyler)
But short films are not inferior, just different. I think the short gives a freedom to film-makers. What's appealing is that you don't have as much responsibility for storytelling and plot. They can be more like a portrait, or a poem. View quote
Jane Campion
No, I think that a person writes a poem because they have an inner urge of something that they want to express, and I think it's that inner urge that you want to express when you write a piece of music. View quote
Leo Ornstein
Critics? How do they happen? I know how it happened to me. I would send a poem or story to a magazine and they would say this doesn't suit our needs precisely but on the other hand you sound interesting. Would you be interested in doing a review? View quote
Leslie Fiedler
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. View quote
Linton Kwesi Johnson
In a poem, the words happen; they just come. I let them. Otherwise, I wouldn't write. To interfere with what is happening is to distort the poem. Just a very small degree of intelligence and supervision is necessary. Very tactful. Any revision later that violates the text as it came, that begins rewriting the words, is fake. View quote
Louis Dudek
The pleasure that I take in writing gets me interested in writing a poem. It's not a statement about what I think anybody else should be doing. For me, it's an interesting tension between interior and exterior. View quote
Marilyn Hacker
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. View quote
Marilyn Hacker
Perhaps first and foremost is the challenge of taking what I find as a reader and making it into a poem that, primarily, has to be a plausible poem in English. View quote
Marilyn Hacker
I have experienced healing through other writers' poetry, but there's no way I can sit down to write in the hope a poem will have healing potential. If I do, I'll write a bad poem. View quote
Marilyn Hacker
Translation makes me look at how a poem is put together in a different way, without the personal investment of the poem I'm writing myself, but equally closely technically. (Marilyn Hacker)
I don't know whether a poem has be there to help to develop something. I think it's there for itself, for what the reader finds in it. View quote
Marilyn Hacker
The reason one writes poems is so that your poem will be remembered. View quote
Peter Davison
My sense of a poem - my notion of how you revise - is: you get yourself into a state where what you are intensely conscious of is not why you wrote it or how you wrote it, but what you wrote. View quote
Philip Levine
If that voice that you created that is most alive in the poem isn't carried throughout the whole poem, then I destroy where it's not there, and I reconstruct it so that that voice is the dominant voice in the poem. View quote
Philip Levine