A Quote by Lucille Clifton

Poems come out of wonder, not out of knowing. — © Lucille Clifton
Poems come out of wonder, not out of knowing.
I write poems for children to help them celebrate the joy and wonder of their world and to look at their lives from the inside out. I write humorous poems to tickle the funny bone of their imaginations.
A visionary is someone who can see the future, or thinks he sees the future. In my case, I use it and it comes out right. That doesn't come from daydreams or dreams, but it comes from knowing the market and knowing the world and knowing people really well and knowing where they're going to be tomorrow.
I started out writing poems before I figured to put melodies to them and play the guitar. Somewhere, there's a book out there on all those early songs and poems. I hope no one ever finds it. I don't think it's my finest work.
Poems have ideas. The ideas of poems come out of their emotions and their emotions are carried on images.
You know what I would love? I would love to be one of those actresses who can come out with a film or come out with a new commercial without the world knowing about it.
(on grief) And you do come out of it, that’s true. After a year, after five. But you don’t come out of it like a train coming out of a tunnel, bursting through the downs into sunshine and that swift, rattling descent to the Channel; you come out of it as a gull comes out of an oil-slick. You are tarred and feathered for life.
I think my poems immediately come out of the sensuous and emotional experiences I have.
As children we all wonder - we wonder all the time. And that gets lost in adulthood. It gets beaten out, it gets filtered out or diluted out.
Robert Frost says in a piece of homely doggerel that he has hoped wisdom could be not only Attic but Laconic, Boeotian even - "at least not systematic"; but how systematically Frostian the worst of his later poems are! His good poems are the best refutation of, the most damning comment on, his bad: his Complete Poems have the air of being able to educate any faithful reader into tearing out a third of the pages, reading a third, and practically wearing out the rest.
I accept that life is uncertain--that the goal is not to become more certain about anything but to relax more into the mystery of not knowing what will come next. And then, miracle of miracles, out there in the deep and uncertain water, I come into a peaceful knowing--a faithful wisdom that surpasses control and certainty.
Whatever you are inside, the good and bad will manifest in the outside world. It will come out in some way. It will come out in your work. It will come out in words. It will come out.
There are definitely connections between poems, but I wanted each to stand on its own. I guess it goes back to the idea of trying to zoom in and out, and to modulate, so there are different ways of looking at any experience for the reader. Even having short poems and long poems - there has to be some kind of variation in the experience of reading as a whole.
I like to joke that I started writing long poems out the anxiety over ending and starting poems. It just seemed easier to keep going.
Our bodies are garbage heaps: we collect experience, and from the decomposition of the thrown-out eggshells, spinach leaves, coffee grinds, and old steak bones out of our minds come nitrogen, heat, and very fertile soil. Out of this fertile soil bloom our poems and stories. But this does not come all at once. It takes time. Continue to turn over and over the organic details of your life until some of them fall through the garbage of discursive thoughts to the solid ground of black soil.
A book of poems doesn't just come out by chance, an editor has to select it, a publisher has to distribute it or you will never see it.
Not that I've always loved the movie when they finally come out, or if they ever come out-because many of them don't come out-but I've gotten to work with really good story editors and stuff like that.
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