A Quote by Stephen Burt

To do a poem justice, explain what makes it unique; to get a poem noticed, explain what makes it typical.

Stephen Burt

Quote Topics

Explain Get Justice Makes Noticed Poem Typical Unique

Quote Author

Stephen Burt
English - Poet
Born: 1971

I think a good poem should have some inscrutable part. You can't quite explain it. The poem can only explain itself to a certain limit and at that point you enter into a little bit of mystery. That for me is the perfect poem: to begin in clarity and to end in mystery.

Billy Collins

When words become a poem, it makes sense to me, but I don't know how to explain to someone why the words are the way they are. It's just the logic of the poem to me.

Sarah Kay

From the beginning I felt that I didn't ever want to leave the impression that the process of writing a poem is totally mysterious. I couldn't explain everything that went on in the creation of a poem, but I could try to explain as much as I knew. I thought readers deserved that. I didn't want to set myself apart as being someone special.

Pattiann Rogers

I can explain my body and my brain, but there's something more. I can't explain my own existence - what makes me a unique human being.

John Eccles

For poetry is, I believe, always an act of the spirit. The poem teaches us something while we make it. The poem makes you as you make the poem, and your making of the poem requires all your capacities of thought, feeling, analysis, and synthesis.

May Sarton

If you can explain a poem, it is not a poem. Poetry has to be inexplicable.

Luis Gonzalez

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.

Yang Wanli

When I start writing a poem, I can usually know quite early on whether it's a lineated or prose poem, but I don't think I can explain how. It's like deciding whether to wear a skirt or a pair of pants.

Matthea Harvey

Theology is-- or should be-- a species of poetry,which read quickly or encountered in a hubbub of noise makes no sense. You have to open yourself to a poem with a quiet, receptive mind, in the same way you might listen to a difficult piece of music... If you seize upon a poem and try to extort its meaning before you are ready, it remains opaque. If you bring your own personal agenda to bear upon it, the poem will close upon itself like a clam, because you have denied its unique and separate identity, its inviolate holiness.

Karen Armstrong

You might as well ask an artist to explain his art, or ask a poet to explain his poem. It defeats the purpose. The meaning is only clear thorough the search.

Rick Riordan

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.

Maya Angelou

A successful poem says what a poet wants to say, and more, with particular finality. The remarks he makes about his poems are incidental when the poem is good, or embarrassing or absurd when it is bad and he is not permitted to say how the good poem is good, and may never know how the bad poem is bad. It is better to write about other people's poetry.

Randall Jarrell

Sometimes the only way I know how to work through something is by writing a poem. And sometimes I get to the end of the poem and look back and go, 'Oh, that's what this is all about,' and sometimes I get to the end of the poem and haven't solved anything, but at least I have a new poem out of it.

Sarah Kay

Translation makes me look at how a poem is put together in a different way, without the personal investment of the poem I'm writing myself, but equally closely technically.

Marilyn Hacker

Two opposing forces inhabit the poem: one of elevation or up-rooting, which pulls the word from the language: the other of gravity, which makes it return. The poem is an original and unique creation, but it is also reading and recitation: participation. The poet creates it; the people, by recitation, re-create it. Poet and reader are two moments of a single reality.