A Quote by Erica Jong

Often I find that poems predict what I'm going to do later in my own writing, and often I find that poems predict my life. So I think poetry is the most intense expression of feeling that we have.

Erica Jong

Quote Topics

Expression Expression Of Feeling Feeling Find Going Intense Later Life Most My Life My Own Often Own Poems Poetry Poetry Is Predict Think Writing

Quote Author

Erica Jong
American - Novelist
Born: March 26, 1942

People have explored these questions ['Why am I here?', 'What is life about?'] in poems, not that they found their answers, but in reading [poems], I think, you find a certain beauty in the questioning, and that is then poetry.

Gwee Li Sui

I think that the casual reader and the lyric and confession are trickily tied up together. I mean often when I read my students' poems my first impulse is to say, "O, the subject of this pronoun, this 'I,' is whatever kid wrote this poem." The audience for lyric poems is "confessionalized" to some extent. And I think this audience tends to find long narrative poems, for instance, kind of bewildering.

Shane McCrae

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.

Anna Journey

If the motive of writing is for some people a kind of exercise in dirty laundry, that's one thing. I've always thought of my poems as meant to be overheard, as I think all of these poems are. It seems to me if you get experience right, even your most painful or humiliating experiences - if you get those experiences right for yourself and make discoveries as you go along and find for them some formal glue - they will be poems for others.

Stephen Dunn

People often say that it is easier to predict the way things are going to be 10 to 20 years in the future than to predict how it is going to be 3 years from now.

Mark Zuckerberg

Every so often I find some poems that are too good for the readers of The Atlantic because they are a little too involved with the nature of poetry, as such.

Peter Davison

I try not to think in terms of what poems or poets should do. Most of us appreciate a wide diversity in music, in cooking, in movies, but in our own medium, poetry, we often fail to make allowances for tastes and projects other than our own.

James Arthur

I started out in life as a poet, I was only writing poetry all through my 20s, it wasn't until I was about 30 that I got serious about writing prose. While I was writing poems, I would often divert myself by reading detective novels, I liked them.

Paul Auster

I started out in life as a poet; I was only writing poetry all through my 20s. It wasn't until I was about 30 that I got serious about writing prose. While I was writing poems, I would often divert myself by reading detective novels; I liked them.

Paul Auster

If you can find two poems in a book, it could be a pretty good book for you. You know, two poems you really like. There are some poets who are fairly big names in contemporary poetry and who write a book and I might like three or four poems in the book, but the rest of them don't appeal to me personally; but I think that's the way it really ought to be. I think it's really a rare thing to like everything that somebody has written.

Ted Kooser

Writing fiction, for me, is a more indirect form of self-exploration than writing verse. When I'm working on a novel I'm moving characters around and I'm thinking about plot and there's a lot of other things going on at the level of structure and story. With a poem, a single idea or line or emotion can sometimes be enough - there's often a sense, in the best poems, of capturing a single instant. Perhaps poems differ from prose in the degree of solace they can offer - by speaking so personally, so directly, about shared experience. A few lines of poetry can provide comfort.

Nick Laird

Writing for me is an ongoing practice of facing and countering fears. And so, in that sense, I have always been responding to phobias. I am often most surprised by the writing that comes from facing fears that strike closest to home, poems that explore internalized phobias about gender identity, sexuality, and the body, poems that struggle with a question like do I deserve love?

Jenny Johnson

My days are filled with work I love - reading poems, writing poems, talking with people about poems, teaching, directing a writing program, hosting readings, etc.

Deborah Landau

If you want to write poetry, you must have poems that deeply move you. Poems you can't live without. I think of a poem as the blood in a blood transfusion, given from the heart of the poet to the heart of the reader. Seek after poems that live inside you, poems that move through your veins.