Top 1200 Writing Poems Quotes & Sayings - Page 2

The only thing I remember writing in prison is a couple of poems for an inmate magazine they did once a year.

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.

Writing poems is my way of celebrating with the world that I have not committed suicide the evening before.

I don't expect you'll hear me writing any poems to the greater glory of Ronald and Nancy Reagan.

My poems are certainly in the lyric tradition, but perhaps a reader can tell me more precisely who I am as a poet. How can I be so old and not know? I have always been deeply grateful for the urge to write, the desire to create, that's certain. Writing has always been the way I make sense of life. Perhaps my poems define me, rather than the other way around. They do constantly surprise me.

It took me 14 years to write poems about Vietnam. I had never thought about writing about it, and in a way I had been systematically writing around it.

I began to imitate what I was reading, and I started to become a poet, even though what I was writing were not good poems.

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.

As long as I can remember, I've been writing - first poems, then stories, and by my early teenage years I was also in love with sailing.

I started writing when I was in school. I wrote essays and in my teen years I used to write sorrowful sad stories and poems as you do at the age.

I'm truly an outsider in the poetry world. When I started writing, I was trying to move my poems away from modernist lines.

I didn't sit down then and start writing poems, but it was in the back of my mind.

It's true, there aren't many explicit references to Canada in my book. And not many explicit references to the U.S., either. I try to fill my poems with enough real, observed detail that the poems create a believable world - but I don't write poems for the sake of telling my own story. My life is not important or interesting enough to warrant that kind of documentary. Instead I try to use my experience as a way of understanding situations that are common to many people. I want readers to project their own lives onto my poems.

I think that the casual reader and the lyric and confession are trickily tied up together. I mean often when I read my students' poems my first impulse is to say, "O, the subject of this pronoun, this 'I,' is whatever kid wrote this poem." The audience for lyric poems is "confessionalized" to some extent. And I think this audience tends to find long narrative poems, for instance, kind of bewildering.

I think if you put something in a file that says "war poems" or "love poems" that you already restrict the way in which the poem might move.

I was writing notes, but not composing poems. The Hunter began to develop out of this fragmented process.

At times of crisis or distress, it's poems that people turn to. (Poetry) still has a power to speak to people's feelings, maybe in a way that fiction, because it works in a longer way, can't. There's a little bit of your brain that mourns and grieves that you're not writing poetry, but actually as long as I'm writing something, I'm happy.

There's nothing in the world for which a poet will give up writing, not even he is a Jew and the language of his poems is German.

A lot of my activity in the theatre, and even in writing poems, was a kind of retrospective aggro on the English teacher who wouldn't allow me to read poetry aloud.

I started out really young, when I was four, five, six, writing poems, before I could play an instrument. I was writing about things when I was eight or 10 years old that I hadn't lived long enough to experience. That's why I also believe in reincarnation, that we were put here with ideas to pass around.

I think I've been writing black poems all along, wearing my white mask. I'm always the victim ... but no longer!

I'm very clever at hiding poems perhaps more clever than I am at writing them.

I began just writing poems and then fell in love with the form.

It seems like I've been writing since birth! I started writing poems before I got to school. I wrote the class musical in first grade - both words and music. It was about a bunch of vegetables who got together in a salad. I played the chief carrot!

Heartbreak was the impetus to me writing poems and music in the first place.

In my own writing, I've mostly abandoned end-rhyme, but wordplay is still a huge part of my process. I've written a series of mermaid poems in the last few years. The first one was called "The Straightforward Mermaid" which arose from my delight in that word combination. After that, I decided that future mermaid poems would have to be words ending in "d" or "t," which led to "The Deadbeat Mermaid," "The Morbid Mermaid" and so forth . . .

The number of people writing poems is vast, and their reasons for doing so are many, that much can be surmised from the stacks of submissions.

When I am asked how I began writing poems, I talk about the indifference of nature.

I've been writing poems since I was in the Navy - to Rosalynn. I found I could say things in poems that I never could in prose. Deeper, more personal things. I could write a poem about my mother that I could never tell my mother. Or feelings about being on a submarine that I would have been too embarrassed to share with fellow submariners.

With fiction, I tend to get to my desk and start writing. Poetry I write in my head, often while walking, so that my poems have an organic quality, hopefully.

People called me Cilla when I was little because I was always singing and writing poems.

Natalie Lyalin is writing some of the best poems in the world. There is an evil in her gorgeous poem-hearts. She must have sold her heart to the devil to write like this—so beautiful, so funny and so strange. Her images stack and stack down the page without spilling, each line such a bombshell you'll start reading backward to the first line. These poems are like babies—they will pop out of trees.

I like to read a lot of books and poems. Even though poems are short, I enjoy the emotions that come with them.

Early on, if I was alone two three nights in a row, I'd start writing poems about suicide.

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.

The way a small child might dream of visiting Disneyland, I dreamed of writing books. Never did I think my poems would become that.

I have always loved writing and I used to pen down my thoughts, little stories and poems growing up.

I had written here and there about my mother in my poems. There are poems for her in my first and second books.

If poems very different from my own bring pleasure to a group of readers, who am I to say that the poems should have been written differently?

I also like poems that are haunted by a structure or a narrative, or poems that frisk flirtatiously at the boundary of sense.

Once a poet always a poet, and even though I haven't written poems for a long time, I can nonetheless say that everything I've ever learned about writing lyrical fiction has been informed by three decades of writing in lines and stanzas. For me the real drama of fiction is almost always the drama of the language.

Poems are the 'daredevil' of writing because a poem will say what nobody else wants to say.

Maybe you're one of those people who writes poems, but rarely reads them. Let me put this as delicately as I can: If you don't read, your writing is going to suck.

I've been writing poems and stories since I was about 13.

I consider my films to be poems that are all as personal as my writing and as hand-made.

Since the age of 11, I have loved writing poems and fragments from my life.

When one's not writing poems - and I'm not at the moment - you wonder how you ever did it. It's like another country you can't reach.

For me, it makes sense to address shocking experiences through poems because of the way poems also have that effect on the reader.

Poems mesmerized me, and I felt better when I was writing them, or trying to - more in touch with something deep and dark within myself.

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.

A blend of fact and fiction has been used in various forms since the dawn of creative writing, starting with sagas and epic poems.

My poems please the brave: My poems, short and sincere, Have the force of steel Which forges swords.

He was all emotion all the time, constantly talking about his feelings and his profound love for her. He was minutes from getting his first period. He wrote poems too. It's my personal belief that if men are writing poems, they're making up for something else like a big hair back, or one ball. Not that one ball is a bad thing. Especially since I don't know any females who are dying to their their hands on a set of balls. The way I see it, the less balls, the better.

I began writing early - very, very early... I was already writing short stories for the radio and selling poems to poetry and art festivals; I was involved in school plays; I wrote essays, so there was no definite moment when I said, 'Now I'm a writer.' I've always been a writer.

She could become a spinster, like Emily Dickinson, writing poems full of dashes and brilliance, and never gaining weight.

But writing poems and letters doesn't seem to do much good.

People have been writing songs and poems since the time we had brains.

The most exhilarating for the writer and the reader, are gift-things-poems which arrive on their own energy, poems that in William Shakespeare's term "slip" from you.

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.

Poems are taught as though the poet has put a secret key in his words and it is the reader's job to find it. Poems are not mystery novels.