Top 1200 Writing Poems Quotes & Sayings - Page 3

Keats writes better about poems than anybody I've ever read. The things that he says about what he wants his own poems to be are the ideals that I share.

I suppose it's useful in designating writing that tends to come from personal experience, work that delineates an "I," but it's a loose lasso, one which may rope certain poems by one poet and not others.

I was always writing - whether it's ideas, poems, whatever - because we spent so much time in the car traveling from city to city.

One of these poems I wrote after having been here only a month. The other, I wrote this morning. In the space between the two poems, I have found acres of grace

I started writing poems, and when I first tried prose, I wrote bad articles and essays and columns, and I didn't have a handle on it. I didn't go to a school that really taught you how to write that stuff.

It is no use thinking that writing of poems - the actual writing - can accommodate itself to a social setting, even the most sympathetic social setting of a workshop composed of friends. It cannot. The work improves there and often the will to work gets valuable nourishment and ideas. But, for good reasons, the poem requires of the writer not society or instruction, but a patch of profound and unbroken solitude.

I wanted many of the poems to have long legs. At first I was calling them clothespin poems, before I knew what I was doing. The lines seem pulled on either end, tight and taut against the wind.

When I go to the shore, I take along the poems of Pablo Neruda. I suppose it's because the poems are simultaneously lush and ripe and kind of lazy, yet throbbing with life - like summer itself.

I started writing poetry when I was six. I had this teacher who didn't believe the poems I'd bring in were mine because they were dark and sad. But I wrote about what I experienced in my childhood.

It's fun to see someone grow as a writer, moving from their first workshopped poems to publishing their earliest poems to having a book accepted for publication. It's great to see poets with persistence succeed.

In 1977, I wrote a series of poems about a character, Black Bart, a former cattle rustler-turned-alchemist. A good friend, Claude Purdy, who is a stage director, suggested I turn the poems into a play.

Even when I was in school, I was doing papers and writing poems; I always had an edge to my delivery. It was never conscious, but it was more so my organic way of thinking about things.

Writing is performative - and while, yes, the words in essence will be there "forever," poems are often about ecstatic moments rather than trying to pin down a particular truth of an event.

I never deny poems when they come; whatever I am doing, whatever I am writing, I lay it aside and attend to the arriving poem.

Your poems are of interest to mankind; your liver isn't. Drink till you write well and feel sick. Bless your poems and be damned to you.

I don't know if there are topics that I unconsciously avoid, but as soon as they pop up in my writing, I try to take on those topics, whether or not I publish the poems.

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.

Years ago I used to set my alarm for 4 am, so that I could wake up in the middle of a dream and move directly into writing. I guess my favorite poems contain a mixture of intuitive and analytical thought.

I gasp, because Isn't that just exactly what I've been doing too: writing poems and scattering them to the winds with the same hope as Gram that someone, someday, somewhere might understand who I am, who my sister was, and what happened to us.

A lot of people are writing poems and don't realize it. They have this limited idea of how the poem should sound or what subjects it should address.

Clouds are poems, and the most moving poems linger on the blackboard so long, written in cursive so lovely, they also exist inside our fingertips. We never really erase them at the end of the lesson.

I started to write my own stories, like small novels, and those novels became poems, and after poems, they became lyrics, and song came from that.

I'd try to write my poems in a certain rhythm. I had my rock 'n' roll stuff for performing and my denser stuff for writing.

People have explored these questions ['Why am I here?', 'What is life about?'] in poems, not that they found their answers, but in reading [poems], I think, you find a certain beauty in the questioning, and that is then poetry.

Since I was a small child, I was always writing either poems or plays... plays in which I had the starring part.

I've got to have something. I want to stop it all, the whole monumental grotesque joke, before it's too late. But writing poems and letters doesn't seem to do much good.

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 started out wanting to write great poems, then wanting to discover true poems. Now, I want to be the poem.

My first book of poems was published privately in 1949. That was my mother. The book was '25 Poems.' It cost 200 dollars.

My youngest son becomes an award-winning nature photographer, and I cannot resist writing poems to his pictures. My daughter loves to cook, though I do not. Yet together, we write a cookbook with fairy tales. And now a second.

In addition to writing in received forms, I have also had fun making up forms - Möbius strips and visual poems, particularly.

You've read some of the poems in this new unpublished book [Walker's Alphabet], e.g., the poem "C." I have a number of poems whose titles are letters of the alphabet:?A, B, C, D, E, F.

If you were going to make sculptures of them, the swivel poems would be disparate objects all attached with hinges and the prose poems would be small sheep wrapped in extra wool.

I have taught the long poem off and on for years. The more book-length poems I read and studied and taught the more interested I was in the possibilities in writing a poetry that applied formal and substantive options of narrative and non-narrative, lyric and non-lyric. I found many pleasures in this kind of writing. The long poem is as old as the art form.

I was unnerved to learn in my twenties that the poems of Emily Dickinson that I had memorized as a girl were not the poems as she had written them.

Because so many poets have chosen a political idiom right now in the US and so many poets have assigned value and inherent knowledge to their racial identity and used that as a form of argumentation, I'm thinking now's a good time to buy low for my own poems and write poems that are deeply in the interior and the psyche. There are plenty of people out there working on subjects of political poetry, partisan poetry, all the way through to crossing the threshold of propaganda. I start thinking now's a good time for me to start writing about the myths of my own psyche.

Outlining is not writing. Coming up with ideas is not writing. Researching is not writing. Creating characters is not writing. Only writing is writing.

Poems not only demand patience, they demand a kind of surrender. You must give yourself up to them. This is the real food for a poet: other poems, not meat loaf.

I am interested in the confines of the page and busting through/off the page as well. A writer must let go of the line when writing prose poems, which brings its own pleasures.

A risk for a poet-novelist is imbalance: The poems can flatten into prose or lose their intensity of focus; the novels can stall amid lofty writing or literary preciousness and ignore the engine of plot and character.

Poems are ways of saying you clearly remember the day of your death and your tomb. When I am writing poetry, I relive my days when a woman inside me dies many times.

As a university student, I tried hard to write poems in Korean. It was at that time that I foresaw my death and the world's death. I think my poems started at that time.

I had always written. I had written stories and poems. Then I started writing plays.

My father read poetry to me, encouraged me to memorize poems. But the writing of it was quite a different thing.

I used to stand on the corner in San Diego with poems sticking out of my hip pocket, asking people if there was a place where I could read poems. The audience is half of the poem.

However, I began to submit poems to British magazines, and some were accepted. It was a great moment to see my first poems published. It felt like entering a tradition.

I tried to write poems in rhyme. I tried writing songs. Sometimes I jotted down a thought. I would keep a log of spontaneous thoughts.

Writing is for stories to be read, books to be published, poems to be recited, plays to be acted, songs to be sung, newspapers to be shared, letters to be mailed, jokes to be told, notes to be passed, recipes to be cooked, messages to be exchanged, memos to be circulated, announcements to be posted, bills to be collected, posters to be displayed and diaries to be concealed. Writing is for ideas, action, reflection, and experience. It is not for having your ignorance exposed, your sensitivity destroyed, or your ability assessed.

Entering into writing a poem is an emotional endeavor for me as well as a spiritual and creative one. Having to write those poems for the inauguration, I started asking deeper questions about my cultural identity, and my connection to America.

...few young poets [are] testing their poems against the ear. They're writing for the page, and the page, let me tell you, is a cold bed.

If you can find two poems in a book, it could be a pretty good book for you. You know, two poems you really like. There are some poets who are fairly big names in contemporary poetry and who write a book and I might like three or four poems in the book, but the rest of them don't appeal to me personally; but I think that's the way it really ought to be. I think it's really a rare thing to like everything that somebody has written.

On July 26, 1916, I announced to all my friends in America that from now on I resolved to write no more poems in the classical language, and to begin my experiments in writing poetry in the so-called vulgar tongue of the people.

Our poems will have failed if our readers are not brought by them beyond the poems.

Well it is certainly the case that the poems - which were in fact published during Shakespeare's lifetime - are weird if they began or originated in this form, as I think they did, because the poems get out of control.

Good poems ask us to have complex minds and hearts. Even simple-of-surface poems want that. Perhaps those are the ones that want it most of all, since that's where they do their work: in the unspoken complexities, understood off the page.

I was writing poems when I was young, you know, because my father was a poet, so it was absolutely normal to follow my father.

Even though I was a reluctant reader in junior high and high school, I found myself writing poems in the back of class.

I love reading beautiful stories. I love poems and yes, I fantasize about someone writing beautiful lines for me.

Actually, my first literary heroes were the Romantic poets, so I began to get serious by writing poems. I have notebooks full of them that I cherish but am afraid to look at.

My earlier poems were sadder than my poems are today, perhaps because I wrote them in confusion or when I was unhappy. But I am not a melancholy person, quite the contrary, no one enjoys laughing more than I do.