A Quote by Denise Levertov

Writing poetry is a process of discovery...you can smell the poem before you see it....Like some animal.

Denise Levertov

Quote Topics

Animal Before Discovery Like Poem Poetry Poetry Is Process See Smell Some Writing Writing Poetry

Quote Author

Denise Levertov
American - Poet
October 24, 1923 - December 20, 1997

As you continue writing and rewriting, you begin to see possibilities you hadn't seen before. Writing a poem is always a process of discovery.

Robert Hayden

I see the shape of the poem before I start writing, and the writing is just the process of arriving at the shape.

Carol Ann Duffy

The laureateship [of U.S. Children's Poet] has brought me a couple of appealing contracts, including my first anthology, the 200-poem The National Geographic Book of Animal Poetry.Apart from the increased travel, I won't let anything interfere with writing poetry.

J. Patrick Lewis

Love is poetry. To fall in love with a person is like understanding a deep, moving poem. Noticing every little detail. To see what the poet shows, to smell what he describes and the urge to taste the intangible.

Shweta Basu Prasad

Poetry is like a puzzle-solving strategy for me. I like to poem my way through tricky questions and ideas. That's about the only consistent thread through my poem-creation process.

Sarah Kay

I approach writing a poem in a much different state than when I am writing prose. It's almost as if I were working in a different language when I'm writing poetry. The words - what they are and what they can become - the possibilities of the words are vastly expanded for me when I'm writing a poem.

Pattiann Rogers

I think that poetry is an act of celebration, that anytime you're writing a poem, it means that you're celebrating something, even if it's a sad poem, if it's an angry poem, a political poem or anything at all. The fact that you're taking the time and energy to pick up this thing and hold it to the light, and say, "Let's take some time to consider this," means that you've deemed it worthy enough to spend time on - which, in my opinion, is celebrating.

Sarah Kay

The process of writing fiction is totally unconscious. It comes from what you are learning, as you live, from within. For me, all writing is a process of discovery. We are looking for the meaning of life. No matter where you are, there are conflicts and dramas everywhere. It is the process of what it means to be a human being; how you react and are reacted upon, these inward and outer pressures. If you are writing with a direct cause in mind, you are writing propaganda. It's fatal for a fiction writer.

Nadine Gordimer

Poetry is poetry. My process is I try to write the best poem I can, in the best way to communicate whatever it is the poem is trying to communicate, and then I try to figure out the best way to present that poem to a live audience. It's all craft, just different stages of craft.

Bao Phi

I entered a poem in a poetry contest around 1987, and the poem won and I received $1,000 for it. That made me realize that maybe what I was writing was worth reading to people. After that, for some reason, I turned to novels and I've written mainly novels ever since.

Sharon Creech

I'm always writing towards a discovery. When I'm writing poems in particular, I'm often writing because a few images coalesced in my mind and I thought, "I wonder why these images are abrading against each other. I wonder what happens if put them in a poem and explore them." I'm trying to learn something every time I write a poem.

Alison Hawthorne Deming

Truly fine poetry must be read aloud. A good poem does not allow itself to be read in a low voice or silently. If we can read it silently, it is not a valid poem: a poem demands pronunciation. Poetry always remembers that it was an oral art before it was a written art. It remembers that it was first song.

Jorge Luis Borges

Baudelaire's L'Héautontimorouménos was long seen to be a sexual sadomasochistic poem, it is now generally accepted that the poem is about writing poetry.

Stephen Dobyns

Poetry has no goal other than itself; it can have no other, and no poem will be so great, so noble, so truly worthy of the name of poem, than one written uniquely for the pleasure of writing a poem.