A Quote by Al Purdy

A collected poems' is either a gravestone or a testimonial to survival.

Al Purdy

Quote Topics

Collected Either Gravestone Poems Survival Testimonial

Quote Author

Al Purdy
Canadian - Poet
December 30, 1918 - April 21, 2000

'A collected poems' is either a gravestone or a testimonial to survival.

Al Purdy

The fist of a revolutionist must be hard like a gravestone; if not, his own gravestone will soon be erected!

Mehmet Murat Ildan

I have also written some poems which have not been collected in a volume.

Grazia Deledda

Ginsberg's Collected Poems contains a wonderful poem about making it with Neal Cassady.

Thom Gunn

I wanted many of the poems to have long legs. At first I was calling them clothespin poems, before I knew what I was doing. The lines seem pulled on either end, tight and taut against the wind.

Lucie Brock-Broido

I get to a point when I've collected together enough words that seem like they want to be songs rather than poems, or sometimes not.

PJ Harvey

Ivan had contrived somehow in the dark of night to replace every watermelon in the watermelon patch with a gravestone, and every gravestone in the engraver's lot with a watermelon

Kristin Cashore

It's true, there aren't many explicit references to Canada in my book. And not many explicit references to the U.S., either. I try to fill my poems with enough real, observed detail that the poems create a believable world - but I don't write poems for the sake of telling my own story. My life is not important or interesting enough to warrant that kind of documentary. Instead I try to use my experience as a way of understanding situations that are common to many people. I want readers to project their own lives onto my poems.

James Arthur

Maybe lurking in my unconscious was the idea that when someone's collected poems are published it means that the poet is dead. I found myself looking at my work as if I were at my own funeral.

Ron Padgett

Humor is essential to survival. Funny poems are vastly underrated. Very underwritten.

Rachel Zucker

Southern poets are still writing narrative poems, poems in forms, dramatic poems.

Robert Morgan

one of Mr. [Thomas] Hardy's ancestors must have married a weeping willow. There are pages and pages in his collected poems which are simply plain narratives in ballad form of how an unenjoyable time was had by all.

Rebecca West

I don't think all poems need to be written in conversational language - those are often great poems but there should also be poems of incoherent bewilderment and muddled mystery.

Matthea Harvey

My obsessions tend to cluster, so I often have families of poems in which only a couple of them make it to the book. It can be satisfying to banish poems to my "crappy poems" file.