A Quote by Ian Hamilton Finlay

As a friendly one. I would still like to write concrete poems, but I can only do it sometimes.

Ian Hamilton Finlay

Quote Topics

Concrete Friendly Like Only Poems Sometimes Still Would Write

Quote Author

Ian Hamilton Finlay
Scottish - Poet
October 28, 1925 - March 27, 2006

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.

Maxine Kumin

What does it mean to be a used white wife, a mother, a tragic girl writing poems? Sandra Simonds gets into these messy words and then tears them apart. Sometimes with the words of others. And sometimes with poems made from scratch. They aren't all bad, these words. But they aren't all good either. And that is where Mother was a Tragic Girl gets its power. You will at moments be laughing but then you will also at moments just as much be crying. If Antigone was alive and decided to write some poems about the nuclear family, she would write them like Sandra Simonds. These are tough.

Juliana Spahr

But I can only write what the muse allows me to write. I cannot choose, I can only do what I am given, and I feel pleased when I feel close to concrete poetry - still.

Ian Hamilton Finlay

Sometimes I write quickly, sometimes I spend several weeks on a single poem. I would really love for readers not to be able to guess which of the poems took so much work!

Wislawa Szymborska

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.

Sarah Vowell

I would read the Shel Silverstein poems, Dr. Seuss, and I noticed early on that poetry was something that just stuck in my head and I was replaying those rhymes and try to think of my own. In English, the only thing I wanted to do was poetry and all the other kids were like, "Oh, man. We have to write poems again?" and I would have a three-page long poem. I won a national poetry contest when I was in fourth grade for a poem called "Monster In My Closet.

Taylor Swift

When I was young, I would write all the time. Novels, plays, and poems. It's like a disease - my life is filled with fantasies, and I have to write them all down.

Christine and the Queens

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.

Edward Hirsch

I want to write poems which are very emotional, but I would have some hesitation in saying I want to write poems which are sentimental.

Andrew Motion

I do bring my teaching together with my writing. I make students write in class, and do the same prompts I give them. I'm always on the lookout for teaching poems - poems that inspire me and my students to write poems in response.

Allison Joseph

When you begin to write poems because you love language, because you love poetry. Something happens that makes you write poems. And the writing of poems is incredibly pleasurable and addictive.

C. K. Williams

I've had journals ever since I was really little. Sometimes I write poems and stuff, but for the most part I write down what happens to me during the day that I don't want to forget. So I have books filled with little things like that.

Miranda Cosgrove

Sometimes my boyfriend would write the lyrics and I would write the melody, and other times I would start from scratch. Or sometimes I would take a local poem and put that to music.

Carly Simon

There is nothing “still” in the remarkably visceral poems of Alexander Long's third collection, Still Life, and nothing is at rest in these restless and edgy poems. Conversational and kinetic, these poems chart the traces left by the shifting overlays of the templates of literature, rock-and-roll, and contemporary culture. As each poem in Still Life attempts to fix a focus upon a scene or subject, the protean natures under view draw the poet into the eddies and complexities of reflection. This is a powerful and moving collection of poems.