A Quote by Jim Harrison

I got $30 from Nation magazine for a poem and $500 for my first book of poems.

Jim Harrison

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Book First Got Magazine Nation Poem Poems

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Jim Harrison
American - Novelist
December 11, 1937 - March 26, 2016

It was early on in 1965 when I wrote some of my first poems. I sent a poem to 'Harper's' magazine because they paid a dollar a line. I had an eighteen-line poem, and just as I was putting it into the envelope, I stopped and decided to make it a thirty-six-line poem. It seemed like the poem came back the next day: no letter, nothing.

August Wilson

When Emily Dickinson's poems were published in the 1890s, they were a best-seller; the first book of her poems went through eleven editions of a print run of about 400. So the first print run out of Boston for a first book of poems was 400 for a country that had fifty million people in it. Now a first print run for a first book is maybe 2,000? So that's a five-time increase in the expectation of readership. Probably the audience is almost exactly the same size as it was in 1900, if you just took that one example.

Robert Hass

You've read some of the poems in this new unpublished book [Walker's Alphabet], e.g., the poem "C." I have a number of poems whose titles are letters of the alphabet:?A, B, C, D, E, F.

Shirley Geok-lin Lim

My first book of poems was published privately in 1949. That was my mother. The book was '25 Poems.' It cost 200 dollars.

Derek Walcott

The judges who awarded the 1980 Commonwealth Poetry Prize to my first collection of poems, Crossing the Peninsula and Other Poems, cited with approval and with no apparent conscious irony my early poem, "No Alarms." The poem was composed probably sometime in 1974 or 1975, and it complained about the impossibility of writing poetry - of being a poet - under the conditions in which I was living then.

Shirley Geok-lin Lim

Today is the first of August. It is hot, steamy and wet. It is raining. I am tempted to write a poem. But I remember what it said on one rejection slip: 'After a heavy rainfall, poems titled 'Rain' pour in from across the nation.

Sylvia Plath

When I'm assembling a book I concentrate as though I were writing a poem. A truly imagined arrangement will indicate gaps and generate new poems. I re-read the new poems in my folder in the hope that this might happen.

Michael Longley

There are many poets that use as my models. In my first book of poems, I had several for the "Sleepwalkers," I had several poems that were apprentice poems like this in which I take a walk with a poet who is no longer alive.

Edward Hirsch

Lucky accidents seldom happen to writers who don't work. You will find that you may rewrite and rewrite a poem and it never seems quite right. Then a much better poem may come rather fast and you wonder why you bothered with all that work on the earlier poem. Actually, the hard work you do on one poem is put in on all poems. The hard work on the first poem is responsible for the sudden ease of the second. If you just sit around waiting for the easy ones, nothing will come. Get to work.

Richard Hugo

Everybody has a magazine and a channel. There are 500 channels and 500 magazines, and we wonder why we're not united as a country.

Bill Maher

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 started freelancing, writing op-eds and book reviews, one at a time. I then got the opportunity to write recurring freelance pieces for 'The Nation' magazine, focusing on how the Internet was changing politics.

Ari Melber

You get up and, first thing in the morning, you do your 500 words. Do it every day and you’ve got a book in eight or nine months.

Vaclav Smil

I believe in creative failing - to contine to write poems that fail and fail and fail until a day comes when you've got a thousand poems behind you and you're relaxed and you finally write a good poem.

Ray Bradbury

I wrote a number of poems about Kah Tai lagoon, when Safeway was building that huge, ugly store down there where I used to love to watch the birds nest. That political poem, or environmental poem, was unsuccessful because Safeway built there anyway. And yet the poem has something to say today, as it did then. And I speak here only of my own poems. The agenda for every poet has to be different because most of us write from direct human experience in the world.

Sam Hamill

A Quote by Jim Harrison

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