A Quote by Jimmy Santiago Baca
Every poem is an infant labored into birth and I am drenched with sweating effort, tired from the pain and hurt of being a man, in the poem I transform myself into a woman.
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I keep feeling that there isn't one poem being written by any one of us - or a book or anything like that. The whole life of us writers, the whole product I guess I mean, is the one long poem - a community effort if you will. It's all the same poem. It doesn't belong to any one writer - it's God's poem perhaps. Or God's people's poem.
Imagine writing a poem with a sweating, worried-looking boy handing you a different pencil at the end of every word. My golf, you may say, is no poem; nevertheless, I keep wanting it to be one.
Often when I write poetry I don't quite know what I'm saying myself. I mean, I can't restate the poem. The meaning of the poem is the poem.
The beginner hugs his infant poem to him and does not want it to grow up. But you may have to break your poem to remake it.
The subject of the poem usually dictates the rhythm or the rhyme and its form. Sometimes, when you finish the poem and you think the poem is finished, the poem says, "You're not finished with me yet," and you have to go back and revise, and you may have another poem altogether. It has its own life to live.
When I encountered "The Lady of Shallot" (to take a "for instance" allusion from the many in the book, this one from the "Etiology" section) it was still considered a "great poem." What does that poem - or rather a particular presentation of that poem (hey, admire this!) - do to a young woman?
Do not wait for a poem; a poem is too fast for you. Do not wait for the poem; run with the poem and then write the poem.
The poet must work with brush and paper,but this is not what makes the poem. A man does not go in search of a poem - the poem comes in search of him.
What I try to do is to go into a poem - and one writes them, of course, poem by poem - to go into each poem, first of all without having any sense whatsoever of where it's going to end up.
What I try to do is to go into a poem - and one writes them, of course, poem by poem - to go into each poem, first of all without having any sense whatsoever of where it's going to end up
When I'm writing the poem, I feel like I have to close my eyes. I don't mean literally, but you invite a kind of blindness, and that's the birth of the poem.
Ordering a man to write a poem is like commanding a pregnant woman to give birth to a red-headed child.
I feel like I am in the service of the poem. The poem isn't something I make. The poem is something I serve.
You must believe: a poem is a holy thing - a good poem, that is. The poem, even a short time after being written, seems no miracle; unwritten, it seems something beyond the capacity of the gods.
If I thought that any poem of mine could have been written by anyone else, either a contemporary or a forerunner, I should suppress it with a blush; and I should do the same if I ever found I were imitating myself. Every poem should be new, unexpected, inimitable, and incapable of being parodied.
[In response to Alfred Tennyson's poem "Vision of Sin," which included the line "Every moment dies a man, every moment one is born."] If this were true, the population of the world would be at a stand-still. In truth, the rate of birth is slightly in excess of death. I would suggest that the next edition of your poem should read: "Every moment dies a man, every moment 1 [and] 1/16 is born." Strictly speaking, the actual figure is so long I cannot get it into a line, but I believe the figure 1 [and] 1/16 will be sufficiently accurate for poetry.
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