Quotes on Poems

What I wanted to do was use literature and different kinds of stories and poems as a springboard, tapping into the creativity of our teens - I wanted teenagers to come up with their own creative responses to literature - using books themselves as a starting point.

Before I was ever a poet, my father was writing poems about me, so it was a turning of the tables when I became a poet and started answering, speaking back to his poems in ways that I had not before.

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.

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 the first little jolt I got was reading Gerard Manley Hopkins - I liked other poems... but Hopkins was kind of electric for me - he changed the rules with speech, and the whole intensity of the language was there and so on.

You want a poem to unsettle something. There's a deep and interesting kind of troubling that poems do, which is to say, 'This is what you think you're certain of, and I'm going to show you how that's not enough. There's something more that might be even more rewarding if you're willing to let go of what you already know.'

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.

In our period, they say there is free speech. They say there is no penalty for poets, There is no penalty for writing poems. They say this. This is the penalty.

The headmaster asked to read one of my poems at some celebration or other when I was about 10. When I look back, that is phenomenal encouragement.

When I worked on a magazine, I learned that there are many, many writers writing that can't write at all; and they keep on writing all the cliches and bromides and 1890 plots, and poems about Spring and poems about Love, and poems they think are modern because they are done in slang or staccato style, or written with all the 'i's' small.

My poems tend to have rhetorical structures; what I mean by that is they tend to have a beginning, a middle, and an end. There tends to be an opening, as if you were reading the opening chapter of a novel. They sound like I'm initiating something, or I'm making a move.

I'm very aware of the presence of a reader, and that probably is a reaction against a lot of poems that I do read which seem oblivious to my presence as a reader.

My poems getting published in Russia doesn't make me feel in any fashion, to tell you the truth. I'm not trying to be coy, but it doesn't tickle my ego.

I'm happy to stick with my persona. There are themes of love lost and love regained, but the main themes of all poems are basically love and death, and that seems to be the message of poetry.

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

Poems, novels - these things belong to the nation, to the culture, and the people.

Poems, for me, begin as a social engagement. I want to establish a kind of sociability or even hospitality at the beginning of a poem. The title and the first few lines are a kind of welcome mat where I am inviting the reader inside.

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.

Some of us have been thinking and talking too long without doing anything. Poems are perfect; picketing, sometimes, is better.

I am increasingly attracted to restricting possibility in the poem by inflicting a form upon yourself. Once you impose some formal pattern on yourself, then the poem is pushing back. I think good poems are often the result of that kind of wrestling with the form.

In truth, I became a conductor because deep down I wanted to conduct Brahms's four symphonies and Richard Strauss's tone poems.