A Quote by Mary Oliver
... to write well it is entirely necessary to read widely and deeply. Good poems are the best teachers.
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I've reached a point in life where it would be easy to let down my guard and write simple imagistic poems. But I don't want to write poems that aren't necessary. I want to write poems that matter, that have an interesting point of view.
Read more. Read. Read. Read. Deeply, widely, read. Learn all kinds of subjects. The smarter you are as an actor, the better an actor you'll be.
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.
Read. As much as you can. As deeply and widely and nourishingly and irritatingly as you can. And the good things will make you remember them, so you won't need to take notes.
I love chapbooks. They're in some ways the ideal form in which to publish and read poems. You can read 19 poems in a way you can't sit down and read 60 to 70 pages of poems.
I tell writers to keep reading, reading, reading. Read widely and deeply. And I tell them not to give up even after getting rejection letters. And only write what you love.
whether they write poems or don't write poems, poets are best.
My advice to aspiring poets is to find a community of other poets who are willing to read one another's work. And to read widely, in a variety of time periods and cultures, to identify which traits of poems are appealing and which aversive. And what can be stolen.
Misquotation is, in fact, the pride and privilege of the learned. A widely- read man never quotes accurately, for the rather obvious reason that he has read too widely.
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.
That is the difference between good teachers and great teachers: good teachers make the best of a pupil's means; great teachers foresee a pupil's ends.
If I'm still wistful about On the Road, I look on the rest of the Kerouac oeuvre--the poems, the poems!--in horror. Read Satori in Paris lately? But if I had never read Jack Kerouac's horrendous poems, I never would have had the guts to write horrendous poems myself. I never would have signed up for Mrs. Safford's poetry class the spring of junior year, which led me to poetry readings, which introduced me to bad red wine, and after that it's all just one big blurry condemned path to journalism and San Francisco.
I guess that would have been 1968. I was a freshman in college and I wasn't writing good poems, but I was at least trying to write poems then.
It didn't occur to me that my books would be widely read at all, and that enabled me to write anything I wanted to. And even once I realized that they were being read, I still wrote as if I were writing in secret. That's how one has to write anyway--in secret.
The poem in Where Good Swimmers Drown are love poems. But love poems that defy the divisions between emotion and intellect, private and public, life and art, writer and reader. To read Elbe's poems is to discover not only what it means to be in love, but what it means to be alive.
Writers who don't read can't write well. It's that simple. The more you read, the better you read, the better you'll write. The upside is that you can't read too much, and even 'junk' reading can be constructive.
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