How do poems grow? They grow out of your life.
Interpretation
Poetry is deeply influenced by personal experiences and life events.
The quote emphasizes that poetry is not just a creation of imagination but is rooted in the experiences, emotions, and events that one encounters in life. Robert Penn Warren suggests that the authenticity of poems stems from the lived experiences of individuals, indicating that personal growth and life narratives serve as the fertile ground from which poetry emerges.
In practice
In a writing workshop, when discussing the origin of creative works, one could say, 'As Robert Penn Warren noted, poems grow out of your life.'
...the air so still it aches like the place where the tooth was on the morning after youβve been to the dentist or aches like your heart in the bosom when you stand on the street corner waiting for the light to change and happen to recollect how things once were and how they might have been yet if what happened had not happened.
The poem is a little myth of man's capacity of making life meaningful.
And what we students of history always learn is that the human being is a very complicated contraption and that they are not good or bad but are good and bad and the good comes out of the bad and the bad out of the good, and the devil take the hindmost.
Yet the definition we have made of ourselves is ourselves. To break out of it, we must make a new self. But how can the self make a new self when the selflessness which it is, is the only substance from which the new self can be made?
So little time we live in Time,_x000D_ _x000D_ And we learn all so painfully,_x000D_ _x000D_ That we may spare this hour's term_x000D_ _x000D_ To practice for Eternity.
For what is a poem but a hazardous attempt at self-understanding: it is the deepest part of autobiography.
We are all hungry and thirsty for concrete images. Abstract art will have been good for one thing: to restore its exact virginity to figurative art.
Very often, footage that you have shot develops its own dynamic, it's own life, that is totally unexpected, and moves away from you're original intentions. And you have to acknowledge, yes, there is a child growing and developing and moving in a direction that isn't expected-accept it as it is and let it develop its own life.
Poetry is the art of creating imaginary gardens with real toads.
I'm always drawn to stories that people don't know about, particularly when they're inside of a story that everyone knows about.
Picasso had a saying - 'good artists copy, great artists steal' - and we have always been shameless about stealing great ideas.
I wish you could see the two cats drowsing side by side in a Victorian nursing chair, their paws, their ears, their tails complementarily adjusted, their blue eyes blinking open on a single thought of when I shall remember it's their supper time. They might have been composed by Bach for two flutes.
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