Poems Quotations | Page 2

I have been told my poems unfold in such a way that it is not at all obvious from the outset where they are going or how they will end.

I'd been writing poems for many years, but most of them I didn't like. Then, when I was 23, I wrote one I did like, sent it to 'The Paris Review' - the highest publication I could think of - and they accepted it. No other moment in my literary life has quite come close to that.

Celebrating historic triumphs is a favorite pastime for many Turks. Tales of how Turkic peoples emerged from Central Asia, crossed the steppes to Anatolia, established the Ottoman Empire and ruled for centuries over large swaths of Europe and Asia are the subject of countless legends, poems and books.

I'm always writing tidbits of poems here and there. I'm still writing, just not as much.

I'm a happy camper when I'm doing both: writing and art every day, along with a dose of reading and adventures into what else is being done by other artists/writers and poets. Like breathing. I've written poems or fictions to go with a painting. The source for the inspiration of the art often eludes me.

I have been in love with Emily Dickinson's poetry since I was 13, and, like an anonymous post on findagrave.com says, 'Dear Emily - I hope I have understood.' Emily's poems are sometimes difficult, often abstract, on occasion flippant, but her mind is inside them.

He has written some of the most memorable poems of our time, and his achievement rivals that of great American poets like Robert Frost and Elizabeth Bishop.

He loved language and found a medium to have to express himself with. That was one of best things. Whenever we would go visit my family, almost every occasion I would ask dad what his latest poems were. A lot of times he would have a work in progress and read it and sometimes ask for comment on it.

Kick back and sincerely enjoy this book. I hope some of these poems make you think.

I would not say I chose to write long poems on a conscious level. The long poem has been a relative constant.

I wrote simple poems with deep meaning instead of confusing poems that no one understands.

I wrote my first song when I was six or seven, a silly little song. But I used to write poems in high school - not songs.

I think in the best poems I make a lot of discoveries about voice, about subject, about what my real feelings are.

I think that I shall never see A poem lovely as a tree Poems are made by fools like me, But only God can make a tree

I think that I shall never see A poem lovely as a tree Poems are made by fools like me, But only God can make a tree

I remember writing these terrible poems when I was, like, nine and discovered alliteration.

'Swan,' by Mary Oliver. Poems and prose. Reading from this book is as if visiting a very wise friend. There is wisdom and welcoming kindness on every page.

My mother worked full-time so I was largely ungoverned, free to roam the streets of Detroit from an early age and research the poems to come, a tiny Walt Whitman going among powerful, uneducated people.

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.

My poetry changed when I was 15 years old. One of my uncles, Leo, had written poetry when he was a young man, and he took me down to the family business and he opened a safe and showed me some poems he'd written when he was 19. He also gave me a book of the collected poems of Shelley. And I still have that book.

My poems were just kind of all over the place. They had no focus, no location, nothing. Kind of a series of images that could have been set anywhere. A lot of the poems were just exercises for myself.

My poems tend to be more celebratory and lyrical, and the novels so far pretty dark. Poetry doesn't seem to me to be an appropriate tool for exploring that.

My poems are always about my life in one way or another.

Literature - novels, plays, and poems - can have an uncanny dual life, where they simultaneously represent something eternal and something historical, and this is often how they are taught in school.

Literature is a term that cannot be applied to writings or poems that reel off tales that are false. It should not emerge from the egotistic fancies of the individual.

Literature has been part of my life for as long as I can remember. I can't think back before a time that I didn't love writing and reading. When I was really young, my mother would read poems to me. I loved Edgar Allan Poe - I am sure I didn't understand it, but I loved it.

I think she interpreted her poems very well.

I studied poetry in college and for a year in an MFA program. As time went on, my poems got more and more complicated. What I was really trying to do was tell stories.

I think language does bring us together. Fragile and misleading as it is, it's the best communication we've got, and poetry is language at its most intense and potentially fulfilling. Poems do bring people together.

I was approached by the press itself. I know the publisher, and they came to me to see if I was interested in doing something like this. Some of the poems are kind of inflammatory, but this press is pretty open minded about letting the writer control the work.

My beloved husband goes through radiation, and a book of sonnets is my passionate response. And then after he dies, I write another book of poems as a farewell. The two keywords here are passion and joy. I simply have a passion for writing, and I do it with joy.

Today the U.S. is farther from being nourished by poetry than it was a hundred years ago, when books of poems were best-sellers.

Well, don't kid yourself, I got plenty of crummy poems that I think I might use.

To me, writing is a matter of voice. I think like that. The expression I sometimes use to myself is 'actual song.' That what I do is somewhere on the line between speaking to you as I am now and actual song. And the things I love when I say one of those poems to myself - it's a little bit like singing, it's a little bit like speaking.

Times change and forms and their meanings alter. Thus new poems are necessary. Their forms must be discovered in the living language of their day, or old forms, embodying exploded concepts, will tyrannize over the imagination.

Writing poems is a chance to construct spaces that I want to imaginatively inhabit.

We're trying to work on a larger collaborative project. His interpretation of the poems was so uncannily perfect to me. I was bracing myself - maybe it'll be good, maybe it'll be bad - and it was amazing. It was much better than I expected.

Theoretically, our writers will come to us with nothing. And they will leave with the first draft of a novel, a portfolio of poems or even the first act of a play. The biggest monster of writing is the first blank 250 pages and the program is here to help confront those challenges.

Though my poems are about evenly split between traditionally formal work that uses rhyme and meter and classical structure, and work that is freer, I feel that the music of language remains at the core of it all. Sound, rhythm, repetition, compression - these elements of my poetry are also elements of my prose.

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.

To me many short poems read and write like beginnings that simply whet my appetite; I want to get over that.

Everything is personal - the poems and the crime novels. I have never been involved in any murders, but there are strong autobiographical elements in each.

The title of the poems was The Only Bar in Dixon. We sent it out to The New Yorker on a fluke, and they took them and printed all three in the same issue.

I sometimes like to tinker with poems that have failed, ones that I have sent aside. Even years afterward, I will revisit them if there is something about them that I cannot give up on.

I see poetry as a path toward new understanding and transformation, and so I've looked at specific poems I love, and at poetry's gestures in the broadest sense, in an effort to feel and learn what they offer from the inside.

I've been interested in LeRoi Jones/Amiri Baraka's work for quite a while. My first introduction to LeRoi Jones was when my mother used to read me the 'Dead Lecturer' poems when I was a kid.

The sole literary presence from my childhood was my grandfather, a Jewish immigrant from Latvia, who eccentrically copied poems into the backs of his books. After he died, when I was 8 years old, my grandmother gave his books away, and his poems were lost.

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.

I wanted a perfect ending. Now Ive learned, the hard way, that some poems dont rhyme, and some stories dont have a clear beginning, middle and end. Life is about not knowing, having to change, taking the moment and making the best of it, without knowing whats going to happen next.

Sometimes you see kids addressing issues, whether it be suicide, or drugs affecting them or their family. Sometimes the poems are a cry for help - something they can't express but they need to say. It's feelings and emotions coming out. Not just a story to inform or educate, but true emotions. The other teens can really relate to that.

Samuel Marshak was one of the founders of modern Russian children's literature. Soviet children used to know his poems by heart, but only since glasnost have American editors shown any interest in issuing his poems here.

People betrayed me and I had a really hard time. That, along with what I'd been through with my family and my father and hard times at school meant I was knocked down. It was too much and I felt I'd been through the wringer - I was like a punchbag. I think talking to people is important and my family have helped me through it. I'd definitely be open to going to a therapist. I went when I was younger. But making this record ('Stripped') has been therapeutic. It's a tough record, it's personal and it's made me feel vulnerable. It's honest. Emotionally I've laid myself bare - it's what's in my heart. I've been writing a lot of poems and I wanted to disappear from the public eye and live life for a minute. I didn't want to play it safe.”

No record... can... name the women of talent who were so submerged by child-bearing and its duties, and by general housework, that they had to leave their poems and stories all unwritten.

Once your poems are completed, you send them into the world. You don't write for a coterie of other writers - you write for other human beings.

One Christmas I had no money, and so I went home and just, like, wrote a poem; I mean, I didn't write them, but I just handed out poems as Christmas presents. Like, 'Here's a Pablo Neruda poem that really made me think of you.'

Actors may (or may not) read poems well, but poets have unique rights to their work, and unique insights and interests to offer as we hear their idiom, pacing, tone and emphases,

The Welsh language is one of the oldest in Europe. It possesses poems the origin of which is referred with probability to the sixth century.

Although my mother had the greatest love for Sir Walter Scott, and the highest appreciation of his poems and novels, she never liked Melrose.

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!

It seems to me that if poems should do anything, they should confirm our intimacy at least point us in that direction,

It's the process of writing and life that matters... We are trying to become sane along with our poems and stories.

The book has been kind of a long time in coming. I've been writing since high school and this is my first book and it's kind of drawn from poems written over an extended period.

I turn to poems to find spaces that might enlarge, rather than distill, experience.

In a way, this is giving these kids' poems to the wind.

I'm trying to create a collection of stories - the 'U.F.O.W.A.V.E.' songs are all stories. I haven't really taken direct lyrical influence from other songwriters, but my dad bought me a book of W.H. Auden's poems when I was younger, and the imagery really interested me.

I'm not sure of any direct influence, but some of my most successful poems are short poems. They have kind of a distilled focus, like Dickinson. They're very elliptical. She is quite elliptical - she distills down to the core. But my poetry doesn't sound like Dickinson's.

I love poetry; it's my primary literary interest, and I suppose the kind of reading you do when you are reading poems - close reading - can carry over into how you read other things.

In my twenties, before I learned how to write poems of work, I thought of myself as the person who would capture this world.

I had been writing poems and stories since I learned to make letters. I had placed poems in a hardcover anthology at the age of 6. And I knew more big words than anyone else in the 10th grade.

I tended to write poems about both social and spiritual problems, and some problems one doesn't really want to solve, and so the problems themselves are solved. You certainly don't want to solve problems in poems that haven't been solved in the world.

I read everything. I'll read a John Grisham novel, I'll sit and read a whole book of poems by Maya Angelou, or I'll just read some Mary Oliver - this is a book that was given to me for Christmas. No particular genre. And I read in French, and I read in German, and I read in English. I love to see how other people use language.

I came from a very musical family, so I grew up singing karaoke with the family. My family said 'do this' and brought me to singing lessons. I had always been writing poems and songs.

I believed in fictional characters as if they were a part of real life. Poetry was important, too. My parents had memorized poems from their days attending school in New York City and loved reciting them. We all enjoyed listening to these poems and to music as well.

Great cultural conversation used to show up in poems and essays. It's alive and well but in superficial places like commercials.

The idea of a pseudonym had been flitting around my brain for a long time, along with its cognate, disappearance. In the 1980s, I published some poems under a pen name in a literary magazine to see what it would feel like. It was fun. It was even a little thrilling.

The greatest satisfaction comes from publishing interesting poems and well written, thoughtful critical material, and to help build a community.

The limit is about 300 words. Kipling's ""Recessional"" really did something to England when it was published. It helped them through a bad time. Let me know if you find any great poems lying around.

Let those who would write heroic poems make their life an heroic poem.

She opened up a book of poems and handed it to me written by an Italian poet from the 13th century and every one of them words rang true and glowed like burning coal pouring off of every page like it was written in my soul from me to you.

Some good, some so-so, and lots plain bad: that's how a book of poems is made, my friend