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Quotes about Poems

43 Picture Quotes

515 Written Quotes

(Number One Teacher
teacher should have
qn even ehU'fs heart.
(Because in this game life,
help them Het their start.
qjust want to thank Fu. (name).
5•or aft the things you've done.
you're a very special teacher.
And to me you're number one!

Poems come from incomplete knowledge. Votes: 3

Diane Wakoski

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Poems are never finished - just abandoned Votes: 3

Paul Valery

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Poems can getsleepless tooand becomethe loneliest thingin the universe. Votes: 3

Sanober Khan

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Poems come out of wonder, not out of knowing. Votes: 3

Lucille Clifton

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Poems are rough notations for the music we are. Votes: 3

Rumi

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For the entire Desiderata go to Inspirational Poems page Votes: 3

Max Ehrmann

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Poems that come swiftly are usually the ones that you keep. Votes: 3

Seamus Heaney

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Poems are other people's snapshots in which we see our own lives. Votes: 3

Charles Simic

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Ginsberg's Collected Poems contains a wonderful poem about making it with Neal Cassady. Votes: 3

Thom Gunn

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Poems like to have a destination for their flight. They are homing pigeons. Votes: 3

May Sarton

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Leo Connellan has retained his soul and voice in Provincetown and Other Poems. Votes: 3

Karl Shapiro

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Poems are like dreams: in them you put what you don't know you know. Votes: 3

Adrienne Rich

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Poems are my link with the times, with the new life of my people. Votes: 3

Anna Akhmatova

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Poems are made by fools like me, But only God can make a tree Votes: 3

Joyce Kilmer

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Poems tend to have instructions for how to read them embedded in their language. Votes: 3

Matthea Harvey

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Poems have their own fates, like children. You have only to give birth to them. Votes: 3

Andrei Voznesensky

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Leaving Verses Poems Quotes To say goodbye Isn't a pain Unless you're never going...! (Tee hee) Votes: 3

John Walter Bratton

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Poems seem to have a life of their own. They tell you when enough is enough. Votes: 3

Thomas Lynch

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Poems are a hotline to our hearts, and we forget this emotional power at our peril Votes: 3

Andrew Motion

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Poems give you the lives of others and then circle in on your own inner world. Votes: 3

Frances Mayes

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Poems are the 'daredevil' of writing because a poem will say what nobody else wants to say. Votes: 3

Ralph Fletcher

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Poetry gives us courage and sets us straight with the world. Poems are great companions and friends. Votes: 3

David Whyte

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More or Less Love Poems #11: No babe We'd never Swing together but the syncopation would be something wild Votes: 3

Diane di Prima

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There IS a difference between poetry and prose! Poems should be sonically charged and new to the ear. Votes: 3

Cate Marvin

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Poems don't have to rhyme. Poems are about beauty and emotion; in other words poems are about feelings. Votes: 3

Nikki Giovanni

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To see the Summer Sky Is Poetry, though never in a Book it lieâ True Poems fleeâ Votes: 3

Emily Dickinson

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Poems have ideas. The ideas of poems come out of their emotions and their emotions are carried on images. Votes: 3

E. L. Doctorow

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Poems in a way are spells against death. They are milestones, to see where youwere then from where you are now. Votes: 3

Richard Eberhart

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Poems, like dreams, are a sort of royal road to the unconscious. They tell you what your secret self cannot express. Votes: 3

Erica Jong

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Poems ought to reflect the work the poet does, and his relationships with other people, and family, and institutions, and organization. Votes: 3

Wallace Stegner

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Poems . . . are perfume bottles momentarily unstopped"what they release is volatile and will vanish, and yet it can be released again, Votes: 3

Jane Hirshfield

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Poems for children help them celebrate the joy and wonder of their world. Humorous poems tickle the funny bone of their imaginations. Votes: 3

Charles Ghigna

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I never find words right away. Poems for me always begin with images and rhythms, shapes, feelings, forms, dances in the back of my mind. Votes: 3

Gary Snyder

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I need more and more silence, it feels. Poems don't leap into my mind when I'm distracted, turned outward, with other people, listening to music. Votes: 3

Jane Hirshfield

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Poems can't help but be personal. Mine are certainly an accurate blueprint of the things I think about, if not a record of my daily life. Votes: 3

Matthea Harvey

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All those years and their moments" Crackling bacon, slamming car doors, Poems tried out on friends, Will be one more archive, One more shaky text. Votes: 3

Gary Snyder

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Poems are always interested in what Ivan Illich called 'shadow work,' not least because that is no small part of their own way of working. Votes: 3

Jane Hirshfield

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Poems are a dance of language that comes out when my body taps into the rhythm of language. Rhythm gets us naked and exposes our selves completely. Votes: 3

Kim Hyesoon

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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. Votes: 3

Jessye Norman

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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. Votes: 3

Natalie Goldberg

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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. Votes: 3

Jessye Norman

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Poems are difficult to silence. Votes: 2

Stephen Greenblatt

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Poems aren't postcards to send home. Votes: 2

Anne Sexton

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How do poems grow? They grow out of your life. Votes: 1

Robert Penn Warren

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Spring has returned. The Earth is like a child that knows poems. Votes: 1

Rainer Maria Rilke

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I try to apply colors like words that shape poems, like notes that shape music. Votes: 1

Joan Miro

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Early on, if I was alone two three nights in a row, I'd start writing poems about suicide. Votes: 1

Jack Nicholson

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Only truthful hands write true poems. I cannot see any basic difference between a handshake and a poem. Votes: 1

Paul Celan

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Memory has always been fundamental for me. In fact, remembering what I had forgotten is the way most of the poems get started. Votes: 1

Seamus Heaney

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I've said what I'm prepared to say in my poems, and then journalists think that you're going to tell them a whole lot more. Votes: 1

Wendy Cope

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It's easy to understand why the most beautiful poems about England in the spring were written by poets living in Italy at the time. Votes: 1

Philip Dunne

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I wanted a perfect ending. Now I've learned, the hard way, that some poems don't rhyme, and some stories don't have a clear beginning, middle and end. Votes: 1

Gilda Radner

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I went on all over the States, ranting poems to enthusiastic audiences that, the week before, had been equally enthusiastic about lectures on Railway Development or the Modern Turkish Essay. Votes: 1

Dylan Thomas

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The only difference between me and others is that they think they can change something with cute little poems, nice cards or embracing trees and being nice to little lapdogs. Votes: 1

Henry Rollins

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What I'm fighting for now in my work... for an expression relevant to all manner of blacks, poems I could take into a tavern, into the street, into the halls of a housing project. Votes: 1

Gwendolyn Brooks

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Almost anything is too much. I am trying in my poems to have the reader be the experiencer. I do not want to be there. It is not even a walk we take together. Votes: 1

Mary Oliver

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I'm trying to write poems that involve beginning at a known place, and ending up at a slightly different place. I'm trying to take a little journey from one place to another, and it's usually from a realistic place, to a place in the imagination. Votes: 1

Billy Collins

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You must understand the whole of life, not just one little part of it. That is why you must read, that is why you must look at the skies, that is why you must sing and dance, and write poems and suffer and understand, for all that is life. Votes: 1

Jiddu Krishnamurti

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Imagination makes us aware of limitless possibilities. How many of us haven't pondered the concept of infinity or imagined the possibility of time travel? In one of her poems, Emily Bronte likens imagination to a constant companion, but I prefer to think of it as a built-in entertainment system. Votes: 1

Alexandra Adornetto

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On a very personal level, I have fond memories of spending a lot of time in the Library of Congress working on my collection of poems 'Native Guard.' I was there over a summer doing research in the archives and then writing in the reading room at the Jefferson building. Votes: 1

Natasha Trethewey

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I was a good student, but a speech impediment was causing problems. One of my teachers decided that I couldn't pronounce certain words at all. She thought that if I wrote something, I would use words I could pronounce. I began writing little poems. I began to write short stories, too. Votes: 1

Walter Dean Myers

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Everybody has ideas. The vital question is, what do you do with them? My rock musician sons shape their ideas into music. My sister takes her ideas and fashions them into poems. My brother uses his ideas to help him understand science. I take my ideas and turn them into stories. Votes: 1

Avi

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I think of something quite different from a snapshot. I know of a lot of poems, some very fine ones, that are like snapshots, but I'm more interested in poetry that is like an endless film, long stories, things that weave together many different strands, like a big piece of cloth, not like a photograph. Votes: 1

Robert Bringhurst

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I have always thought of poems as stepping stones in one's own sense of oneself. Every now and again, you write a poem that gives you self-respect and steadies your going a little bit farther out in the stream. At the same time, you have to conjure the next stepping stone because the stream, we hope, keeps flowing. Votes: 1

Seamus Heaney

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During the Gulf War, I remember two little third grade girls saying to me - after I read them some poems by writers in Iraq - 'You know, we never thought about there being children in Iraq before.' And I thought, 'Well those poems did their job, because now they'll think about everything a little bit differently.' Votes: 1

Naomi Shihab Nye

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I keep threatening to keep a formal journal, but whenever I start one it instantly becomes an exercise in self-consciousness. Instead of a journal I manage to have dozens of notebooks with bits and pieces of stories, poems, and notes. Almost every thing I do has its beginning in a notebook of some sort, usually written on a bus or train. Votes: 1

Walter Dean Myers

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Heartbreak was the impetus to me writing poems and music in the first place. Over the years, I had my heart broken so badly that if I didn't find a way to get all the pain out, I was going to lose my mind. I was crazy! Like, wanting to slash tires and smash car windows. Crazy! I was so hurt that I had to write. Votes: 1

Jill Scott

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I grew up in a bookless house - my parents didn't read poetry, so if I hadn't had the chance to experience it at school I'd never have experienced it. But I loved English, and I was very lucky in that I had inspirational English teachers, Miss Scriven and Mr. Walker, and they liked us to learn poems by heart, which I found I loved doing. Votes: 1

Carol Ann Duffy

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Listen to presences inside poems. Votes: 0

Rumi

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Title deeds generally outlast poems. Votes: 0

Mason Cooley

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poems are small moments of enlightenment Votes: 0

Natalie Goldberg

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Have you sipped your poems today? Votes: 0

Helvy Tiana Rosa

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Will slams poems; I slam doors. Votes: 0

Colleen Hoover

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I like Beethoven, especially the poems. Votes: 0

Ringo Starr

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All good poems are victories over something. Votes: 0

Stephen Dunn

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Poets don't finish poems, they abandon them. Votes: 0

Stephane Mallarme

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That's what poems are for, unlivable love. Votes: 0

Tess Gallagher

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I've always thought my poems told stories. Votes: 0

Douglas Dunn

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Lineation can make your break your poems. Votes: 0

Katerina Stoykova Klemer

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Histories in blazonry and poems in stone. Votes: 0

Ouida

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I write poems to figure things out Votes: 0

Sarah Kay

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Many of my poems are not sexual. Votes: 0

Thom Gunn

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In your beauty, how to make poems. Votes: 0

Rumi

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I still read Donne, particularly his love poems. Votes: 0

Carol Ann Duffy

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I still read Donne, particularly his love poems Votes: 0

Carol Ann Duffy

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The ear writes my poems, not the mind. Votes: 0

Stanley Kunitz

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I do not know how to make poems Votes: 0

Henri Michaux

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Some poems are art because of their passion. Votes: 0

Gerald Stern

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I like poems that are daggers that sing. Votes: 0

Frederick Seidel

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There are no honest poems about dead women. Votes: 0

Audre Lorde

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No, I don't know any Emily Dickinson poems! Votes: 0

Andy Richter

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Bill Knott's poems are . . . rhetorical fluff . . . and fake. Votes: 0

Ron Loewinsohn

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Each man has his own batch of poems. Votes: 0

Saul Bellow

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My picture-poems are linguistic margins on visual atolls. Votes: 0

Gunter Brus

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The truth is that the poems are ecstatic. Votes: 0

Derek Walcott

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Having examined three thousand haiku poems - two persimmons. Votes: 0

Masaoka Shiki

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If these poems repeat themselves, then so does Spring. Votes: 0

Rumi

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For poems are like rainbows; they escape you quickly. Votes: 0

Langston Hughes

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I've always wanted to write poems and nothing else. Votes: 0

Mary Oliver

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I've always wanted editors that actually edited my poems. Votes: 0

Victoria Chang

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These poems need to be released from their cages, Votes: 0

Coleman Barks

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...I am writing these poems from inside a lion... Votes: 0

Shel Silverstein

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There are either poems about sex/love or God. Votes: 0

Robert Hass

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There are not enough poems in praise of bed ... Votes: 0

Sylvia Townsend Warner

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My poems are naughty, but my life is pure. Votes: 0

Martial

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Your poems will happen when no one is there. Votes: 0

May Sarton

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My poems mean what people take them to mean. Votes: 0

Paul Valery

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I do think that all of us think in poems. Votes: 0

Naomi Shihab Nye

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I write poems to find out why I write them Votes: 0

Stephen Dobyns

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I've been writing poems and stories since I was about 13. Votes: 0

Kevin Powers

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Women are not supposed to have uteruses, especially in poems. Votes: 0

Maxine Kumin

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Outrage and possibility are in all the poems we know ... Votes: 0

Muriel Rukeyser

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All the poems of our lives are not yet made. Votes: 0

Muriel Rukeyser

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There are poems inside of you that paper can't handle. Votes: 0

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I thought poems were songs for people with bad voices. Votes: 0

Lorna Dee Cervantes

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People can put their best poems straight onto the web. Votes: 0

Roger McGough

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I carry my unwritten poems in cipher on my face! Votes: 0

George Eliot

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in the street of the sky night walks scattering poems Votes: 0

e. e. cummings

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I write poems like some people sing in the bathroom. Votes: 0

Amit Bhatia

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all the wordsall the poems know my warm, soft spots. Votes: 0

Sanober Khan

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I have seen the universe! It is made of poems! Votes: 0

Sjon

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Trees are poems that the earth writes upon the sky. Votes: 0

Khalil Gibran

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Trees are poems that the earth writes upon the sky. Votes: 0

Kahlil Gibran

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Who will read these poems when the people are gone? Votes: 0

Dominic Owen Mallary

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I only submit the poems I think are the strongest. Votes: 0

Shirley Geok-lin Lim

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Novels are about other people and poems are about yourself Votes: 0

Philip Larkin

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When poems are no good they don't make any sense. Votes: 0

Derek Walcott

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whether they write poems or don't write poems, poets are best. Votes: 0

Randall Jarrell

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Your poems are like God's birds; they fly into people's hearts. Votes: 0

Maia Wojciechowska

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I think my poems are slightly underrated by the word accessible. Votes: 0

Billy Collins

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But writing poems and letters doesn't seem to do much good. Votes: 0

Sylvia Plath

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I let my narrative embroidering impulses take over in prose poems. Votes: 0

Matthea Harvey

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When she smiled at me, I felt unborn poems stirring within. Votes: 0

John Mark Green

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My ideal reader is somebody who reads my poems out loud. Votes: 0

James Arthur

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He does not write at all whose poems no man reads Votes: 0

Marcus Aurelius

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It was as important to live poetically as to write poems. Votes: 0

James Broughton

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Early poems are a thing it takes years to live down. Votes: 0

Angela Thirkell

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I don't write poems. I don't give flowers to girls... yet. Votes: 0

Rico Rodriguez

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My poems are hymns of praise to the glory of life. Votes: 0

Edith Sitwell

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Sandra Kasturi's magical poems transform the ordinary into the surreal and exotic. Votes: 0

Phyllis Gotlieb

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'A collected poems' is either a gravestone or a testimonial to survival. Votes: 0

Al Purdy

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A collected poems' is either a gravestone or a testimonial to survival. Votes: 0

Al Purdy

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I think my poems are slightly underrated by the word 'accessible.' Votes: 0

Billy Collins

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Existence itself is nothing if not an amazement. Good poems restore amazement. Votes: 0

Jane Hirshfield

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We tend to put poems into factions. And it restricts our reading. Votes: 0

Thom Gunn

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The finest poems of the world have been expedients to get bread. Votes: 0

Ralph Waldo Emerson

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Southern poets are still writing narrative poems, poems in forms, dramatic poems. Votes: 0

Robert Morgan

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I think it's better if you write poems that look like you. Votes: 0

Richard Hugo

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Many of the poems weave autobiographical elements with fabular or mythic materials. Votes: 0

Anna Journey

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I also write poems, so that is something that I really enjoy. Votes: 0

Billy Sherwood

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My heart is in my/ pocket. It is poems by Pierre Reverdy. Votes: 0

Frank O'Hara

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I found the poems in the fields,And only wrote them down. Votes: 0

John Clare

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There is a time for reciting poems and a time for fists. Votes: 0

Roberto Bolano

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We write poems / as leaves give oxygen - / so we can breathe. Votes: 0

Erica Jong

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I found the poems in the fields And only wrote them down Votes: 0

John Clare

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Humor is essential to survival. Funny poems are vastly underrated. Very underwritten. Votes: 0

Rachel Zucker

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I really just love reading. It's my favorite thing, performing my poems live. Votes: 0

Eileen Myles

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There's two kinds of women--those you write poems about and those you don't. Votes: 0

Jeffrey McDaniel

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Sometimes poetry is inspired by the conversation entered into by reading other poems. Votes: 0

John Barton

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Novels seem to me to be richer, broader, deeper, more enjoyable than poems. Votes: 0

Philip Larkin

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The great philosophers are poets who believe in the reality of their poems. Votes: 0

Antonio Machado

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I'm terrified of switching the computer on because there are so many poems Votes: 0

Roger McGough

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The grand style is available now only in old poems, museums, and parodies. Votes: 0

Mason Cooley

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You can't write poems about trees when the woods are full of policemen. Votes: 0

Bertolt Brecht

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Warriors are poets and poems and all the loveliness here in the worlds. Votes: 0

Amiri Baraka

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But I can't and don't ever want to write bell-yanking confetti-tossing hat-throwing poems. Votes: 0

Andrew Motion

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Everyone thinks they're going to write one book of poems or one novel. Votes: 0

Marilyn Hacker

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When fiction writers like my poems I feel like I've hit the jackpot. Votes: 0

Cate Marvin

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I don't like poems that invent memories, I have enough of my own. Votes: 0

Andre Naffis-Sahely

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What we feel is beyond words. We should be ashamed of our poems. Votes: 0

Nizar Qabbani

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I don't write poems and put them to music. Just let things flow. Votes: 0

Martin Gore

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I'd like to think...that people in pubs would talk about my poems Votes: 0

Philip Larkin

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I began just writing poems and then fell in love with the form. Votes: 0

Simone Muench

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If I wasn't writing poems I'd be washing my hands all the time. Votes: 0

Sherman Alexie

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Are not our noblest feelings as it were the poems of our will. Votes: 0

Honore de Balzac

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By mourning tongues The death of the poet was kept from his poems. Votes: 0

W. H. Auden

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Try to write poems at least one person in the room will hate. Votes: 0

Marvin Bell

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The reason one writes poems is so that your poem will be remembered. Votes: 0

Peter Davison

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No poems can please long or live that are written by water drinkers. Votes: 0

Horace

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Love is the poetry of our feelings. But there are some horrible poems. Votes: 0

Antonio Gala

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Anon, who wrote so many poems without signing them, was often a woman. Votes: 0

Virginia Woolf

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I have also written some poems which have not been collected in a volume. Votes: 0

Grazia Deledda

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Heartbreak was the impetus to me writing poems and music in the first place. Votes: 0

Jill Scott

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By reason of weird translation, many such sets of instructions read like poems anyhow. Votes: 0

Brian Ferneyhough

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Poetry can only be made out of other poems; novels out of other novels. Votes: 0

Northrop Frye

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Each word bears its weight, so you have to read my poems quite slowly. Votes: 0

Anne Stevenson

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A number of poems don't work alone. They need to fit together to work. Votes: 0

Martha Ronk

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Since the age of 11, I have loved writing poems and fragments from my life. Votes: 0

Niki de St. Phalle

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I prefer the absurdity of writing poems to the absurdity of not writing poems. Votes: 0

Wislawa Szymborska

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For me poems are acts re-done, and that can vibrate well into the future. Votes: 0

Anne Waldman

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When you get a class reciting some great poems, it'll tear your heart out. Votes: 0

Derek Walcott

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I remember writing these terrible poems when I was, like, nine and discovered alliteration. Votes: 0

Karen Russell

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He who would write heroic poems should make his whole life a heroic poem. Votes: 0

Thomas Carlyle

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My earliest poems were a way of talking to somebody. I suppose to myself. Votes: 0

Philip Levine

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No poems can please for long or live that are written by water drinkers. Votes: 0

Horace

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I had always written. I had written stories and poems. Then I started writing plays. Votes: 0

Lena Dunham

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The dark night was the first book of poetry and the constellations were the poems. Votes: 0

Chet Raymo

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We have always made mistakes, but the greatest mistakes are the poems we have written. Votes: 0

Tristan Tzara

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Robert Creely's poems have two main characteristics. 1) They are short; 2) they are not short enough. Votes: 0

John Simon

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Creations, whether they are children, poems, or organizations, take on a life of their own. Votes: 0

Starhawk

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Keetje Kuipers' poems are daring, formally beautiful and driven by rich imagery and startling ideas. Votes: 0

Tracy K. Smith

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I think my poems immediately come out of the sensuous and emotional experiences I have. Votes: 0

Sylvia Plath

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I never think of poetry or the poetry scene, only separate poems written by individuals. Votes: 0

Philip Larkin

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I write almost everything, actually. Songs, poems, stories. And stories out of every genre, too. Votes: 0

Jackie Evancho

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I'm very clever at hiding poems perhaps more clever than I am at writing them. Votes: 0

Charles Bukowski

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The poet can only write the poems; it takes the reader to complete the meaning. Votes: 0

Nikki Giovanni

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I have always thought of poems as stepping stones in one's own sense of oneself. Votes: 0

Seamus Heaney

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The few bad poems which occasionally are created during abstinence are of no great interest. Votes: 0

Wilhelm Reich

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I don't write poetry for the New Yorker. My poems appear in the Nation, mostly. Votes: 0

Kevin Sessums

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They're called poems but in reality they're lines given to me to hang on to Votes: 0

John Trudell

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I'm always glad that other people are way smarter about my poems than I am. Votes: 0

Shane McCrae

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If you like my poems let them walk in the evening, a little behind you Votes: 0

e. e. cummings

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Don't write love poems when you're in love. Write them when you're not in love. Votes: 0

Richard Hugo

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I got $30 from Nation magazine for a poem and $500 for my first book of poems. Votes: 0

Jim Harrison

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I am not a nature poet. There is almost always a person in my poems. Votes: 0

Robert Frost

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It is clear that we do not exactly choose our poems; our poems choose us. Votes: 0

May Sarton

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I wish I could write lyrical poems, but I just write the way they come. Votes: 0

Tom Paulin

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The world does not know it needs poems any longer, but we believe it does. Votes: 0

Bin Ramke

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Having my poems set to music by Eric Moe has completely knocked my socks off. Votes: 0

Matthea Harvey

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With my poems, I finally won even my mother. The longest wooing of my life. Votes: 0

Marge Piercy

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People used to say poems were different to songs but I don't think they are. Votes: 0

Tinie Tempah

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When I am asked how I began writing poems, I talk about the indifference of nature. Votes: 0

Lisel Mueller

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An odd phrase, "by heart," he would add, as though poems were stored in the bloodstream. Votes: 0

A. S. Byatt

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I write poems, have always written them, to transcend the painfully personal and reach the universal. Votes: 0

May Sarton

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The great poems are not about experience, but are the experience itself, felt in the body. Votes: 0

David Whyte

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For all their compliments do verses pay? They mayn't, yet these same poems make me gay Votes: 0

Marcus Aurelius

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Like all art, poems are only hints and guesses that draw our attention to something larger. Votes: 0

Luci Shaw

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Those of us who make up poems have agreed not to say what the pain is. Votes: 0

Robert Bly

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I don't create poetry, I create myself, for me my poems are a way to me. Votes: 0

Edith SÃ¶dergran

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I donât know if you or I exist, but somewhere there are poems about us. Votes: 0

Linh Dinh

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I've written poems about gifts. Life is inspirational; sometimes it comes from the most unlikely places. Votes: 0

Ama Ata Aidoo

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The language you use for your poems should be the language you use with your friends. Votes: 0

Robert Bly

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I have no talent. I write poems for myself, to think things through, thatâs all. Votes: 0

Anna Kamienska

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All pasts are like poems; one can derive a thousand things, but not live in them. Votes: 0

John Fowles

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I like having a phrase lying around to get poems started. It's like having a key. Votes: 0

Shane McCrae

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I'm always doing poems from a place of not-knowing, a place of ignorance in a way. Votes: 0

Alison Hawthorne Deming

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Stop this day and night with me and you shall possess the origin of all poems Votes: 0

Walt Whitman

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I hope to leave behind a few poems it will be hard to get rid of. Votes: 0

Robert Frost

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The first task of the poet is to create the person who will write the poems. Votes: 0

Stanley Kunitz

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I'm much more capable of cutting back than of expanding. I've gotten very surgical about poems. Votes: 0

Joan Larkin

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I believe that poets have to be inside their poems somewhere, or the poem won't work. Votes: 0

Joy Harjo

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We all write poems; it is simply that poets are the ones who write in words. Votes: 0

John Fowles

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A painter can turn pennies into gold, for all subjects are capable of being transformed into poems. Votes: 0

Jean-Auguste-Dominique Ingres

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If you read Keats's poems, they're often full of doubts and anxieties. They can be quite tough. Votes: 0

Jane Campion

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On that other novels followed: but I still wrote fairy tales and dreamy poems of another world." Votes: 0

Laurence Housman

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People are born with the knack to write poems and songs. I'm not a poet at all. Votes: 0

Petra Haden

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I like poems you can tack all over with a hammer and there are no hollow places. Votes: 0

John Ashbery

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For poems are not, as people think, simply emotions (one has emotions early enough)-they are experiences. Votes: 0

Rainer Maria Rilke

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I'm a great poet. I don't put my poems on paper: they consist of actions and feelings. Votes: 0

Honore de Balzac

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My first collection of poems was published by Bloodaxe Books, which was then a very new imprint. Votes: 0

Helen Dunmore

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I prefer always to think that I am creating a book, not a series of stand-alone poems. Votes: 0

Martha Ronk

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For a poet, making poems is a way of viewing the world, being in the world, breathing. Votes: 0

Robin Morgan

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Place is extremely important to my work because I am always pulling landscape imagery into my poems. Votes: 0

Cate Marvin

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I seek to be moved, my imagination reborn.Let me feast on poems that feed my hunger. Votes: 0

Susie Clevenger

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The poems are part of my attempt to understand being in the world in an honest way. Votes: 0

Dan Beachy-Quick

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I'm interested in concrete poems - anything that complicates the line between the written and the visual. Votes: 0

Matthea Harvey

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I like it when poems are challenging, when they concern matters important and personal to the author. Votes: 0

Cate Marvin

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I first came across 'The Lake Isle of Innisfree' in college, with other anthologized poems by Yeats. Votes: 0

Billy Collins

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I don't expect you'll hear me writing any poems to the greater glory of Ronald and Nancy Reagan. Votes: 0

Robert Penn Warren

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I was writing notes, but not composing poems. The Hunter began to develop out of this fragmented process. Votes: 0

George Murray

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Some poems are like the Centaurs--a mingling of man and beast, and begotten of Ixion on a cloud. Votes: 0

Henry Wadsworth Longfellow

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When you read my poems or quotes remember you're stepping into the mind that steps outside of me Votes: 0

Stanley Victor Paskavich

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... to write well it is entirely necessary to read widely and deeply. Good poems are the best teachers. Votes: 0

Mary Oliver

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Through the mad mystic hammering of the wild ripping hail The sky cracked its poems in naked wonder Votes: 0

Bob Dylan

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Out of pain and problems have come the sweetest songs, the most poignant poems, the most gripping stories. Votes: 0

Billy Graham

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There are poems about the internet and about the shipping forecast but very few by women celebrating men. Votes: 0

Germaine Greer

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In my godless household, poems were the closest we came to sacred speech -- the only prayers said. Votes: 0

Mary Karr

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My favorite poets may not be your bread and butter. I have more favorite poems than favorite poets. Votes: 0

Rita Dove

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One of the greatest, most noble, and most sublime poems which either this age or nation has produced. Votes: 0

John Dryden

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My poems please the brave : My poems, short and sincere , Have the force of steel Which forges swords . Votes: 0

Jose Marti

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We read Robert Browning's poetry. Here we needed no guidance from the professor: the poems themselves were enough. Votes: 0

Carl Sandburg

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The censorious said she slept in a hammock and understood Yeats's poems, but her family denied both stories. Votes: 0

Hector Hugh Munro

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A novel is what you call something that won't sell if you call it poems or short stories. Votes: 0

Walker Percy

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I would like a simple life / yet all night I am laying / poems away in a long box. Votes: 0

Anne Sexton

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I didn't sit down then and start writing poems, but it was in the back of my mind. Votes: 0

Edward Hirsch

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The reason a poet is a poet is to write poems, not to advertise himself as a poet. Votes: 0

Yehuda Amichai

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I can't imagine having the courage to ask a publisher to do a whole book of my poems. Votes: 0

Frederick Busch

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Babies are like poems. They're beautiful to their creator, but to other people, they're silly and they're irritating. Votes: 0

Doug Stanhope

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I tend to like poems that engage me - that is to say, which do not bore me. Votes: 0

Mark Strand

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I consider my films to be poems that are all as personal as my writing and as hand-made. Votes: 0

James Broughton

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Well, yes: people write poems when they are in love, but a wise man will not print them. Votes: 0

Hans Christian Andersen

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I keep all my poems in my journals and lock them away. They are the start of everything. Votes: 0

Stevie Nicks

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Modern poetry, for me, began not in English at all but in Spanish, in the poems of Lorca. Votes: 0

W. S. Merwin

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Some good, some so-so, and lots plain bad: that's how a book of poems is made, my Friend. Votes: 0

Martial

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I see no reason to spend your life writing poems unless your goal is to write great poems. Votes: 0

Donald Hall

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Yes, I do often write poems from the mind, but I hope I don't ignore feelings and emotions. Votes: 0

Anne Stevenson

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In truth, I'm still slightly embarrassed to say, I am a poet. I'd rather say, I make poems. Votes: 0

Henri Cole

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The majority of poems one outgrows and outlives, as one outgrows and outlives the majority of human passions. Votes: 0

T. S. Eliot

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The best public poems aren't necessarily those that go at the subject like a bull at a gate. Votes: 0

Andrew Motion

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The language with which I make my poems has nothing to do with one spoken here, or anywhere. Votes: 0

Paul Celan

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The Hollywood movies are more like novels, and the kinds of films I make are more like poems. Votes: 0

Stan Brakhage

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Good acts are like good poems. One may easily get their drift, but they are not rationally understood. Votes: 0

Albert Einstein

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I write the poems first, with only a few exceptions for odd reasons, where I'm given the illustration first. Votes: 0

Jack Prelutsky

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I am a genius who has written poems that will survive with the best of Shakespeare, Wordsworth and Keats. Votes: 0

Irving Layton

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I tell my students to think of poems as language plus, language with value added beyond its everyday use. Votes: 0

Monica Youn

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She could become a spinster, like Emily Dickinson, writing poems full of dashes and brilliance, and never gaining weight. Votes: 0

Jeffrey Eugenides

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Gradually I became aware that professing English because I loved poems was like practicing vivisection because I loved dogs. Votes: 0

Michael Donaghy

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I am a genius who has written poems that will survive with the best of Shakespeare, Wordsworth and Keats Votes: 0

Irving Layton

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Writing poems is my way of celebrating with the world that I have not committed suicide the evening before. Votes: 0

Alice Walker

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Today we should make poems including iron and steel And the poet should know how to lead an attack. Votes: 0

Ho Chi Minh

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You may repeat the most marvelous poems. And that is not worth a cent if you don't live it. Votes: 0

Jiddu Krishnamurti

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I would venture to guess that Anon, who wrote so many poems without signing them, was often a woman. Votes: 0

Virginia Woolf

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I think of my best poems as vessels that I can or hope to fill with everything I have. Votes: 0

Alex Lemon

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As a friendly one. I would still like to write concrete poems, but I can only do it sometimes. Votes: 0

Ian Hamilton Finlay

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I'm all over my poems, even if their relation to my everyday life is that of dream to reality. Votes: 0

Matthea Harvey

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I didn't write my poems because I wanted to, they were wrung from me. I had to write them. Votes: 0

Maxine Kumin

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My stories are sometimes closer to poems or meditations, but often there is at least a little narrative in them. Votes: 0

Lydia Davis

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I think I've been writing black poems all along, wearing my white mask. I'm always the victim ... but no longer! Votes: 0

Anne Sexton

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Indeed, I would venture to guess that Anon, who wrote so many poems without signing them, was often a woman. Votes: 0

Virginia Woolf

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In the United States, in poetry workshops, it's now quite a thing to make graduate students learn poems by heart. Votes: 0

Seamus Heaney

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If a writer writes poems and short stories and novels, but nobody ever reads them, is she really a writer? Votes: 0

Jennifer Weiner

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I write a book of poems and then the characters won't go away so I write a play from that. Votes: 0

Grace Cavalieri

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There are a couple of poems I've written with masculine muses, very often the muse to me is a female. Votes: 0

Shirley Geok-lin Lim

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I sit in my tree I sing like the birds My beak is my pen My songs are my poems. Votes: 0

David Almond

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The poems are all wrong. It's a bang, a really big bang. Not a whimper. And sometimes gold can stay. Votes: 0

Kami Garcia

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My advice to my younger self would have been, "Chill. Concentrate on the poems. Everything else will work itself out." Votes: 0

Denise Duhamel

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You don't help people in your poems. I've been trying to help people all my life - that's my trouble. Votes: 0

Charles Olson

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The great poems of heaven and hell have been written and the great poem of earth remains to be written. Votes: 0

Wallace Stevens

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You'll be a poorer person all your life if you don't know some of the great stories and great poems. Votes: 0

Walt Disney

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You don't help people in your poems. I've been trying to help people all my life - that's my trouble Votes: 0

Charles Olson

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I learned to play guitar at a young age and converted poems and stuff that I had written to songs. Votes: 0

Gregory Harrison

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Poetry is what I've done my whole life. And every important thing in my life had found itself into poems. Votes: 0

Donald Hall

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For my best poems were all written when I felt the worst. When I was happy, I didn't write anything. Votes: 0

Langston Hughes

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The idea is to take the most ordinary things and make them extraordinary, as Gerard Manley Hopkins does in his poems. Votes: 0

Alfonso A. Ossorio

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All poems say the same thing, and each poem is unique. Each part reproduces the others, and each part is different. Votes: 0

Octavio Paz

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The trauma said, âDonât write these poems. Nobody wants to hear you cry about the grief inside your bones. Votes: 0

Andrea Gibson

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In truth, I became a conductor because deep down I wanted to conduct Brahms's four symphonies and Richard Strauss's tone poems. Votes: 0

Zubin Mehta

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My father read poetry to me, encouraged me to memorize poems. But the writing of it was quite a different thing. Votes: 0

C. K. Williams

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This is what poems are: with mercy for the greedy, they are the tongue's wrangle, the world's pottage, the rat's star. Votes: 0

Anne Sexton

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In truth, I became a conductor because deep down I wanted to conduct Brahmss four symphonies and Richard Strausss tone poems. Votes: 0

Zubin Mehta

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When I hear Khmer poets, when they recite their poems, I know what they're talking about, I get it right away. Votes: 0

Chath Piersath

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How are his poems?""He's not as good as he thinks he is, but then most of us feel that way. Votes: 0

Charles Bukowski

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Listen to presences inside poems, Let them take you where they will. Follow those private hints, and never leave the premises. Votes: 0

Rumi

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A certain amount of housekeeping also goes on in my poems. I wash doorknobs, do dishes, mop floors, patch carpets, cook. Votes: 0

Jane Hirshfield

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To me many short poems read and write like beginnings that simply whet my appetite; I want to get over that. Votes: 0

John Barton

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There'll always be working people in my poems because I grew up with them, and I am a poet of memory. Votes: 0

Philip Levine

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The world is so great and rich, and life so full of variety, that you can never lack occasions for poems. Votes: 0

Johann Wolfgang von Goethe

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It is not enough for poems to be fine; they must charm, and draw the mind of the listener at will. Votes: 0

Horace

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I have some weak poems in that new collection, which is why I'm not ready to send the collection out yet. Votes: 0

Shirley Geok-lin Lim

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I can explain all the poems that were ever invented - and a good many that haven't been invented just yet. Votes: 0

Lewis Carroll

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The one man in the room who was as big as his poems, huge, with hulk and dynamic chunks of words. Votes: 0

Sylvia Plath

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My novels and poems are meant to be read aloud. That's why jazz musicians have been able to adapt my stuff. Votes: 0

Ishmael Reed

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I started out wanting to write great poems, then wanting to discover true poems. Now, I want to be the poem. Votes: 0

Mark Nepo

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I guess my poems feel to me a bit like they are doing something in relation to experience, i.e. time. Votes: 0

Matthew Zapruder

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To realise belatedly that there are Swahili epic poems which rival their European equivalents for sweep and power has been exciting. Votes: 0

Giles Foden

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To my mind, most prose poems are more prose than poetry. They don't possess most of the qualities of a poem. Votes: 0

Pattiann Rogers

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There's so much to think about when you're becoming an adult, and there's so many great poems about that apprehension and excitement. Votes: 0

Caroline Kennedy

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Each poem in becoming generates the laws by which it is generated: extensions of the laws to other poems never completely take. Votes: 0

A. R. Ammons

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My verses, I cannot say poems. . . . I was following in the exquisite footsteps of Miss Millay, unhappily in my own horrible sneakers. Votes: 0

Dorothy Parker

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My poems are like a dagger Sprouting flowers from the hilt; My poetry is like a fountain Sprinkling streams of coral water. Votes: 0

Jose Marti

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I've written and translated my own poems from English to German. It's basically a summation of my identity as it stands now. Votes: 0

Masiela Lusha

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The poetry of Walt Whitman. I can return again and again to these magnificent poems and still get pleasure from reading them. Votes: 0

Robert Littell

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Ordering is very important with essays, even if a reader doesn't read the essays or the poems in order through the book. Votes: 0

Pattiann Rogers

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Favorite poems are like favorite children. We definitely have them but we never tell as the others would have their feelings hurt. Votes: 0

Nikki Giovanni

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Essentially, mythologies are enormous poems that are renditions of insights, giving some sense of the marvel, the miracle and wonder of life. Votes: 0

Joseph Campbell

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Far off in the red mangroves an alligator has heaved himself onto a hummock of grass and lies there, studying his poems. Votes: 0

Mary Oliver

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The only thing I remember writing in prison is a couple of poems for an inmate magazine they did once a year. Votes: 0

Patricia McConnell

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I have always believed that poems beg to be read aloud, even if the reader is in a world all her own. Votes: 0

J. Patrick Lewis

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My readers at that time were still men of letters; but there had to be other people waiting to read my poems. Votes: 0

Salvatore Quasimodo

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Since I was a small child, I was always writing either poems or plays... plays in which I had the starring part. Votes: 0

Francine Pascal

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I will always try to turn sights and sounds into words. I will always try to shape words into my singing poems. Votes: 0

Arnold Adoff

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But you'd have a job to find many of my poems which would seem to be very influenced by a particular person. Votes: 0

Norman MacCaig

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It is difficult to get the news from poems, yet men die miserably every day for lack of what is found there. Votes: 0

William Carlos Williams

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I would not say I chose to write long poems on a conscious level. The long poem has been a relative constant. Votes: 0

John Barton

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Why does one always ask a writer why they stopped? I am sure everyone finds in any drawer a few dear poems. Votes: 0

Peter Bichsel

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In addition to writing in received forms, I have also had fun making up forms - MÃ¶bius strips and visual poems, particularly. Votes: 0

Denise Duhamel

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Although I cannot see your face As you flip these poems awhile, Somewhere from some far-off place I hear you laughing--and I smile. Votes: 0

Shel Silverstein

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I seem to keep returning to my father in poems because his personality was so extreme, so driven. He did everything to excess. Votes: 0

Robert Morgan

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New friends may be poems but old friends are alphabets. Don't forget the alphabets because you will need them to read the poems. Votes: 0

William Shakespeare

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Macmillan's rejection had left him very downcast... Patrick Swift was invited to peruse the contents and decided that the poems should be published. Votes: 0

Patrick Kavanagh

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I had hoped to be a poet, and for a long time I tried to write poetry. My first published pieces were poems. Votes: 0

Norman Lock

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I was a pretty happy kid, I had to fake it. I had to get into this miserable character before I wrote poems. Votes: 0

Billy Collins

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each new poem is partly propelled by the formal energies of all the poems that have preceded it in the history of literature. Votes: 0

May Sarton

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I also like poems that are haunted by a structure or a narrative, or poems that frisk flirtatiously at the boundary of sense. Votes: 0

Matthea Harvey

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It snowed right before Jack stopped talking to Hazel, fluffy white flakes big enough to show their crystal architecture, like perfect geometric poems. Votes: 0

Anne Ursu

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my poems covered the bare places in my childhood like the fine, new skin under a scab that hasn't yet fallen off completely. Votes: 0

Tove Ditlevsen

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I'm truly an outsider in the poetry world. When I started writing, I was trying to move my poems away from modernist lines. Votes: 0

Richard Grossman

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When poems stop talking about the moon and begin to mention poverty, trade unions, color, color lines and colonies, somebody tells the police. Votes: 0

Langston Hughes

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Well, 'The Wellspring' was written from 1983 to 1986. And it had a section in the beginning that was poems that began from others' experience. Votes: 0

Sharon Olds

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Even though I was a reluctant reader in junior high and high school, I found myself writing poems in the back of class. Votes: 0

Matt de la Pena

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I have no precise idea of who makes up my readership. I'm surprised when I discover people have read my poems at all. Votes: 0

Cate Marvin

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I am pretty interested in hybrid forms. I love graphic novels and I think there should be more graphic poems in the world. Votes: 0

Matthea Harvey

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There must of course be a relationship between translating and making poems of your own, but what it is I just don't know. Votes: 0

Robert Fitzgerald

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I'm partial to coffee shops, brain work, and poems on the page. I write after midnight. Sometimes, twisty syntax happens, and I surrender. Votes: 0

Marvin Bell

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I like poems that inspire, that make us think and reflect. It's like putting love into the world for whoever picks it up. Votes: 0

Peleg Top

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Decide for yourself what kind of works you want to create... facts, essays, poems - do you want to speak or to sing? Votes: 0

Ernst Haas

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Reading about the response of people in stories, plays, poems, helps us to respond more courageously and openly at our own moments of turning. Votes: 0

Madeleine L'Engle

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A blend of fact and fiction has been used in various forms since the dawn of creative writing, starting with sagas and epic poems. Votes: 0

Antony Beevor

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The poets who have written the best poems about war seem to be the poets whose countries have experienced an invasion or vicious dictatorships. Votes: 0

Billy Collins

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He thought her beautiful, believed her impeccably wise; dreamed of her, wrote poems to her, which, ignoring the subject, she corrected in red ink. Votes: 0

Virginia Woolf

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Poverty is very good in poems but very bad in the house; very good in maxims and sermons but very bad in practical life. Votes: 0

Henry Ward Beecher

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I'd rather call prose poems something else, for clarity - something like "poetic prose," prose that contains a quality of poetry, but not poems. Votes: 0

Pattiann Rogers

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My poems, I think, exist in a state of tension between the love of natural beauty and the fear of natural meaninglessness or absurdity. Votes: 0

Hayden Carruth

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I want to be clear about this. If you wrote from experience, you'd get maybe one book, maybe three poems. Writers write from empathy. Votes: 0

Nikki Giovanni

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I know, basketball is a dance. I didn't understand the significance of that type of training at first. I was supposed to read poems... Votes: 0

Dirk Nowitzki

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He who creates three to five haiku poems during a lifetime is a haiku poet. He who attains to completes ten is a master. Votes: 0

Matsuo Basho

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The spoken word community was significant in making me want to write accessible and urgent poems. Bob Holman, in particular, was an impressive figure. Votes: 0

Denise Duhamel

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Remember the plants, trees, animal life who all have their families, their histories too. Talk to them, listen to them. They are alive poems. Votes: 0

Joy Harjo

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He's never going to sit at my feet and write me poems, which is good because I hate poetry, except dirty ones that rhyme. Votes: 0

Ann Aguirre

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Trees are poems the earth writes upon the sky, We fell them down and turn them into paper, That we may record our emptiness. Votes: 0

Khalil Gibran

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Ye are better than all the ballads That ever were sung or said; For ye are living poems, And all the rest are dead. Votes: 0

Henry Wadsworth Longfellow

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I suppose I have written novels to find out what I thought about something and poems to find out what I felt about something. Votes: 0

May Sarton

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I love my funny poems, but I'd rather break your heart. And if I can do both in the same poem, that's the best. Votes: 0

James Tate

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Trees are poems the earth writes upon the sky, We fell them down and turn them into paper,That we may record our emptiness. Votes: 0

Kahlil Gibran

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In 1971, when I was 29, I wrote my first volume of poetry. I am a poet, and I have published four books of my poems. Votes: 0

Tony Buzan

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I think it's true to say that in 1973 I could read every book of poems that was published in a year, and I did. Votes: 0

Robert Hass

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The bag I wanted was beyond reason - something to hold my poems, twice as big as the universe and it must be androgynous. Votes: 0

Eileen Myles

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The words we construct, the poems we write and the songs we sing, become the love story of a stranger we have never seen. Votes: 0

M.F. Moonzajer

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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. Votes: 0

James Broughton

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I tell it stories now and then and feed it images like honey. I will not speculate today with poems that think they're money. Votes: 0

Anne Sexton

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the poems to come are for you and for me and are not for mostpeople... you and i are human beings; mostpeople are snobs. Votes: 0

e. e. cummings

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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. Votes: 0

Chath Piersath

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I see my poems as interlinked. No poem gives an answer. It may offer other questions, it may instigate other questions that then become poems. Votes: 0

Pattiann Rogers

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In all the poems I've written I've not really engaged in politics, and when I've found myself moving in that direction I've always stopped myself. Votes: 0

Simon Armitage

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My poems are political in the deeper sense of the word. Political means to live in your time, to be a man of your time. Votes: 0

Yehuda Amichai

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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. Votes: 0

Patti Smith

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Time sped. And the poet through sorrow Became like his suffering kind. Again he toiled over his poems To lighten the grief of his mind... Votes: 0

Ella Wheeler Wilcox

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Hypocrisy, false labels, can create slogans but no poems; propaganda but not life: there are no roots, there are no realities to nurture creative work. Votes: 0

Pablo Antonio Cuadra

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God may reduce you on Judgment Day to tears of shame, reciting by heart the poems you would have written, had your life been good. Votes: 0

W. H. Auden

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I admire the poetic relationship to place as enacted in Wallace Stevens' poems; his poetics strikes me as an argument against the restraints of realism. Votes: 0

Cate Marvin

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The best books of our times have included the three mature volumes of Philip Larkin. They're very short books of poems, and very carefully arranged. Votes: 0

Robert Morgan

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I like to joke that I started writing long poems out the anxiety over ending and starting poems. It just seemed easier to keep going. Votes: 0

Alison Hawthorne Deming

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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. Votes: 0

Bernardo Bertolucci

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I get to a point when I've collected together enough words that seem like they want to be songs rather than poems, or sometimes not. Votes: 0

PJ Harvey

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All is fish that comes to the literary net. Goethe puts his joys and sorrows into poems, I turn my adventures into bread and butter. Votes: 0

Louisa May Alcott

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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. Votes: 0

Amy Lowell

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I didn't think about whether I was writing poems. I was thinking. And the more I was thinking, the more there was I didn't understand. Votes: 0

David Antin

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I was very committed to the process of composing, working at poems, putting things together and taking them apart like some kind of experimental filmmaker. Votes: 0

David Antin

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If our dreams could edit the news (and sometimes our nightmares) these poems are how they'd wake us up to the urgency of our times. Votes: 0

Betsy Sholl

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Everyone should be able to do one card trick, tell two jokes, and recite three poems, in case they are ever trapped in an elevator. Votes: 0

Daniel Handler

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I am interested in the movement of my own thoughts and in trying make the poems feel more accurate to experience, including the experience of thinking. Votes: 0

Rachel Zucker

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As Borges has taught us, all the books in the library are contemporary. Great poems are like granaries: they are always ready to enlarge their store. Votes: 0

William H. Gass

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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. Votes: 0

Mark Strand

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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. Votes: 0

Sophie Hannah

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I like poems that affect me emotionally and also provoke me to further, deeper thought. I enjoy challenge, but not, I think, for its own sake. Votes: 0

James Arthur

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The notes I have made are not a diary in the ordinary sense, but partly lengthy records of my spiritual experiences, and partly poems in prose. Votes: 0

Edvard Munch

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My poems often start with an idea, some kind of inspiration. I don't expect anything. Every now and then something like "The One Truth" comes out. Votes: 0

Philip Schultz

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I always knew that I was tremendously creative. I recited love poems, I wrote stories and I got excellent grades in every subject, except for maths. Votes: 0

Shakira

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Creativity is essential to any kind of joyful living. Sometimes I act, sometimes I draw, I paint, I write poems. I can't imagine living without it. Votes: 0

Zephyr Teachout

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...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. Votes: 0

Stanley Kunitz

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I have been writing songs and poems since I was a little girl. I started writing short scripts, which evolved into the idea for a book. Votes: 0

Hilary Duff

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I wondered if I was just the sum of my brain scan, little dots clustered in my frontal lobe. Is that where the poems came from?. Votes: 0

Betsy Lerner

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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. Votes: 0

Fernando Pessoa

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My songs were influenced not so much by poetry on the page but by poetry being recited by the poets who recited poems with jazz bands. Votes: 0

Bob Dylan

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It may be said that poems are in one way like icebergs: only about a third of their bulk appears above the surface of the page. Votes: 0

Howard Nemerov

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I got to thinking that poems were like people. Some people you got right off the bat. Some people you just didn't get--and never would get. Votes: 0

Benjamin Alire Saenz

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I don't really feel my poems are mine at all. I didn't create them out of nothing. I owe them to my relations with other people. Votes: 0

Robert Graves

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The Black Mountain poet I like most is the early Creeley. Those early poems seem very lyrical and very traditional, with a lot of voice and character. Votes: 0

Robert Morgan

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Interesting is when one can produce a picture that is pretty, but with undercurrents. The metaphor that comes to mind is in the poems of Robert Frost. Votes: 0

Jamie Wyeth

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I used to write poems more when I was younger, but I haven't in a long time. I just write ideas and paragraphs and go from there. Votes: 0

Kacey Musgraves

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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. Votes: 0

Paul Celan

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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. Votes: 0

Nathaniel Philbrick

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It is always hard for poets to believe that one says their poems are bad not because one is a fiend but because their poems are bad. Votes: 0

Randall Jarrell

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We have a lot of long narrative poems written in the 20th century, but they're not very well known, and they're not read by very many people. Votes: 0

Robert Morgan

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Fine natures are like fine poems; a glance at the first two lines suffices for a guess into the beauty that waits you if you read on. Votes: 0

Edward Bulwer-Lytton, 1st Baron Lytton

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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. Votes: 0

May Sarton

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My brother used to say that I wrote faster than he could read. He wrote two books - of poems - better than all mine put together. Votes: 0

Laurence Housman

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I was working on the proof of one of my poems all the morning, and took out a comma. In the afternoon I put it back again. Votes: 0

Oscar Wilde

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I started writing after the death of my grandfather - memories, poems, etc. It was very personal; for years I did not share my writing with anyone. Votes: 0

Chitra Banerjee Divakaruni

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The more that accrues, the more depth, weight, and breadth we can bring to the poems, which we then need to throw overboard so we don't sink. Votes: 0

Dorianne Laux

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My earliest poems sing of the absolute necessity of allowing love to invade and pervade one's life. That can make the miracle happen in reality. Try it. Votes: 0

James Broughton

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For children: I'm writing a picture book about the Big Dipper and a novel about a cricket, a firefly and a vole. For grownups: I'm writing poems. Votes: 0

Kate DiCamillo

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I always wanted to be some kind of writer - I wrote plays and songs and "books" before I realized living and breathing people still wrote poems. Votes: 0

Denise Duhamel

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Talentless and incompetent as I am, there are two things I can do, and two things only: walk, with my own two feet; compose, composing my poems. Votes: 0

Santoka Taneda

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I'm lucky enough to occasionally be able to do something I love - write poems - and unlucky enough that what I love confuses and overwhelms me. Votes: 0

Mary Ruefle

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I want to write poems that are natural, luminous, deep, spare. I dream of an art so transparent that you can look through and see the world. Votes: 0

Stanley Kunitz

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I can't think of a case where poems changed the world, but what they do is they change people's understanding of what's going on in the world. Votes: 0

Seamus Heaney

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The language is spare and under control and has a genuine immediacy...The poems never preach but are lined out with a cool and therefore devastating effect Votes: 0

Vern Rutsala

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One attraction of Latin is that you can immerse yourself in the poems of Horace and Catullus without fretting over how to say, "Have a nice day." Votes: 0

Peter Brodie

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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? Votes: 0

James Arthur

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If your house has Cold Mountain poems They are better for you than sutras Hang them up where you can see them Read them and read them again Votes: 0

Hanshan

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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. Votes: 0

Yusef Komunyakaa

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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. Votes: 0

Rita Dove

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My poems are more my silence than my speech. Just as music is a kind of quiet. Sounds are needed only to unveil the various layers of silence. Votes: 0

Anna Kamienska

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I guess that would have been 1968. I was a freshman in college and I wasn't writing good poems, but I was at least trying to write poems then. Votes: 0

Edward Hirsch

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I have a little journal that I always keep with me, and when I need to, I'll write poems and things. It really helps to clear my head. Votes: 0

Haley Pullos

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The chances are that, in the course of his lifetime, the major poet will write more bad poems than the minor, simply because major poets write a lot. Votes: 0

W. H. Auden

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What we call a poem is mostly what is not there on the page. The strength of any poem is the poems that it has managed to exclude. Votes: 0

Harold Bloom

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Poetic justice, poetic justice.. if I told you that a flower bloom in a dark room would you trust it. I mean I write poems in these songs. Votes: 0

Kendrick Lamar

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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. Votes: 0

Matthea Harvey

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I write poems for myself and I write poetry that gets torn apart and becomes songs. I have a lot of respect for words, the power of words. Votes: 0

Kurt Cobain

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In the Book of Poetry there are three hundred poems, but the meaning of all of them may be put in a single sentence: Have no debasing thoughts. Votes: 0

Confucius

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My poems are almost all written as Diane. I don't have any problems with that, and if other women choose to identify with this, I think that's terrific. Votes: 0

Diane Wakoski

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In my case, performance is part of the medium. Sometimes I feel that it's my main medium, and that the presentation of my poems on the page is secondary. Votes: 0

James Arthur

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And sometimes you look at the first poems by someone and you go, "They have freshness and a sense of wonder that is never recaptured again by that poet." Votes: 0

Edward Hirsch

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I try to hold both history and wilderness in mind, that my poems may the true measure of things and stand against the unbalance and ignorance of our times. Votes: 0

Gary Snyder

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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. Votes: 0

John Burnside

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For poems are not words, after all, but fires for the cold, ropes let down to the lost, something as necessary as bread in the pockets of the hungry. Votes: 0

Mary Oliver

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I've thought of the last line of some poems for years and tried them out, It wouldn't work because the last line was much too beautiful for the poem. Votes: 0

Howard Nemerov

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Pretty much the day I stopped being laureate, the poems that had been few and far between came back to me, like birds in the evening nesting in a tree. Votes: 0

Andrew Motion

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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. Votes: 0

Joseph Brodsky

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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. Votes: 0

Andrew Motion

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Whenever I do a comedy show I still just read poems, some of which are intentionally funny and some of which are just bizarre. The mix seems to work well. Votes: 0

Aaron Belz

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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. Votes: 0

Helen Vendler

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And so I told him how living in Japan would give him a leisure no mere tourist has, to know the rhythms of the place, a land of tiny poems. Votes: 0

Donna George Storey

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Don't write poems to make girls like you, because it will not make them like you but it will give them something to quote back at you later in life. Votes: 0

Nick Earls

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All the poems have wolves in them. All but one. The most beautiful one of all. She dances in a ring of fire and throws off the challenge with a shrug. Votes: 0

Jim Morrison

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The more I read my poems, the more I find out about them. I still read them with the same passion I felt when I wrote them as a young man. Votes: 0

Linton Kwesi Johnson

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Once I planned to write a book of poems entirely about the things in my pocket. But I found it would be too long; and the age of the great epics is past. Votes: 0

Gilbert K. Chesterton

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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. Votes: 0

James Welch

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I don't like basements, but definitely basements could be poems. Not fond of skin diseases, but again, there's a pattern. Probably anything could be a poem.

Matthea Harvey

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Even though we've written epic poems and made incredible films about love, I still don't think anyone can understand what it is, or why it means everything.

Yvonne Adhiambo Owuor

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I can't quite see the point of poems like "Wittgenstein Goes for a Walk with A Hawk in Sherwood Forest." I know they're trying to be clever, but they're not.

Andre Naffis-Sahely

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Poetry is a way for me to explore a tingly feeling, to let it play itself out, and also to map it. I feel like I'm making little star maps when I write poems.

Aaron Belz

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You'll accidentally find in barrows of books wrought-iron lines of long-buried poems, handle them with the care that respects ancient but terrible weapons.. .

Bill Vaughan

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And me happiest when I compose poems: Love, power, the huzza of battle are something, are much: yet a poem includes them like a pool water and reflection.

Irving Layton

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The passages in which Milton has alluded to his own circumstances are perhaps read more frequently, and with more interest, than any other lines in his poems.

Thomas B. Macaulay

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Dark pictures, thrones, the stones that pilgrims kiss Poems that take a thousand years to die But ape the immortality of this Red label on a little butterfly .

Vladimir Nabokov

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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

Elizabeth Gilbert

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There's a Welsh poet, R.S. Thomas. He was a very crotchety, strange man, but his poems are wonderful. He was nominated for the Nobel in the 1990s but never won.

Stephen Dobyns

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To desire to write poems that endure-we undertake such a goal certain of two things: that in all likelihood we will fail, and if we succeed we will never know it

Donald Hall

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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.

Mark Strand

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I don't want my poems to be sentimental, though I do acknowledge that sentiment is probably rather under-reported in a lot of people's feelings a lot of the time.

Andrew Motion

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Those who are not very concerned with art want poems or pictures to record for them something they already know - as one might want a picture of a place he loves.

George Oppen

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If rulers refuse to consider poems as crimes, then someone must commit crimes that serve the function of poetry, or texts that possess the resonance of terrorism.

Hakim Bey

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Confessional poetry is, to my mind, more slippery than poems that are sloppily autobiographical; I find the confessional mode much more akin to dramatic monologue.

Cate Marvin

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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.

Kim Addonizio

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There is no comment on pictures but pictures, on music but music, on poems but poetry. If you do, you do. If you don't, you don't. And that's all there is to that.

William Carlos Williams

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You can't just be reactive to the things going on in your life. You have to imagine, and you have to plunder other people's work, books, poems, ideas, observations.

David Gray

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Talk of poems and prayers and promises, and things that we believe in. How sweet it is to love someone, how right it is to care, how long it's been since yesterday.

John Denver

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Mythologies, in other words, mythologies and religions are great poems and, when recognized as such, point infallibly through things and events to the ubiquity of a

Joseph Campbell

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I am gonna write poems til i die and when i have gotten outta this body i am gonna hang round in the wind and knock over everybody who got their feet on the ground.

Ntozake Shange

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Being deeply aware of fragility and ecstasy seems to me an essential part of being alive and living fully - and there's no way for me to separate this from my poems.

Alex Lemon

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To write poems, I think it's important to do research, and research mostly is going to come from books, so all of your reading is potentially helpful to your poetry.

Nikki Giovanni

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Poetry doesn't function by saying things straightforwardly because the language is too imprecise, too limited often, to address the underlying subject of most poems.

Pattiann Rogers

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It is in books, poems, paintings which often give us the confidence to take seriously feelings in ourselves that we might otherwise never have thought to acknowledge.

Alain de Botton

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I never try to force poems into a collection simply because they were written/published within a certain period of time. They will eventually find their perfect home.

Rigoberto Gonzalez

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One critic wrote . . . that my poems sounded as though they had been translated from the Hungarian. I don't know why, but somehow that made me feel quite lighthearted.

Stanley Kunitz

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It is not hope but despair that gives us the measure of our ambitions. We may yield secretly to beautiful poems of hope but grief looms start and stripped of all veils.

Honore de Balzac

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The constructive intellect [genius] produces thoughts, sentences, poems, plans, designs, systems. It is the generation of the mind, the marriage of thought with nature.

Ralph Waldo Emerson

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I see the progress typical in some of my poems as starting with something simple and moving into something more demanding. This is certainly the pattern of weird poetry.

Billy Collins

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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.

Denise Duhamel

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Goodbye, you who are, for me, the postmarks again of shattered towns--Xenia, Burnt Cabins, Hornell-- their loneliness given away in poems, only their solitude kept.

Galway Kinnell

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What we need are poems that interrogate the world of pronouns, open up possibilities of language and life; forms of politics that support and encourage self-affirmation.

Judith Butler

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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.

Kim Hyesoon

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There is a specific kind of day when I feel like writing poems. My senses become really sharp. This day is when I feel as if I am drowning into the abandonment of death.

Kim Hyesoon

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I felt very bad in Washington. . . I didn't like my job, and I didn't know what was going to happen to me, and I was cold and half-hungry, so I wrote a great many poems.

Langston Hughes

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When the end comes, dark and hungry I'll be alone, love When the end comes, black and starving I'll say good-bye, love.-from Golden Tongue: The Poems of Steven Slaughter

Maggie Stiefvater

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For Aliki Barnstone, poetry seems a natural medium. The vision and cadences of these poems suggest a sensibility for which poetry is as inevitable as breathing or eating.

Robert Pinsky

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What I like about prose poems is that they seem to make people uncomfortable - people want to define them, justify them, attack them. Prose poems are natural fence-sitters.

Matthea Harvey

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I enjoyed learning the poems, but I didn't understand of what use they might possibly be. âThey'll keep you company on the day you have no books to read,' my teacher said.

Alberto Manguel

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I don't work on poems and essays at once. They walk on different legs, speak with different tongues, draw from different parts of the psyche. Their paces are also different.

Jane Hirshfield

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So for whatever reason those short lines just felt right to me, in my physical self. They were right for the movement of the poems. Some poems in the book have longer lines.

Matthew Zapruder

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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.

John Dufresne

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Neither is a dictionary a bad book to read. There is no can't in it, no excess of explanation, and it is full of suggestion, the raw material of possible poems and histories.

Ralph Waldo Emerson

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I simply don't want the poems mixed up with my life or opinions or picture or any other regrettable concomitants. I look like a bear and live in a cave; but you should worry.

Randall Jarrell

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Have you reckon'd a thousand acres much? have you reckon'd the earth much? Have you practis'd so long to learn to read? Have you felt so proud to get at the meaning of poems?

Walt Whitman

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Who you are contributes to your poetry in a number of important ways, but you shouldn't identify with your poems so closely that when they are cut, you're the one that bleeds.

Dorianne Laux

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It is very difficult to pass from pleasure to work. Accordingly more poems have been swallowed up by sorrow than ever happiness caused to blaze forth in unparalleled radiance.

Honore de Balzac

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I didn't write poems for a number of years after graduate school because the criticisms of other students in the workshops wouldn't quiet down in my mind when I tried to work.

Kevin Keck

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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.

Denise Duhamel

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Here the frailest leaves of me and yet my strongest lasting, Here I shade and hide my thoughts, I myself do not expose them, And yet they expose me more than all my other poems

Walt Whitman

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I don't think all poems need to be written in conversational language - those are often great poems but there should also be poems of incoherent bewilderment and muddled mystery.

Matthea Harvey

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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.

Matthea Harvey

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I wrote poems and an essay about that weird language. We still remember it to a certain extent, and it still comes up when we're all together. It's so fundamental to how I think.

Paul Beatty

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Poems' deep work is a matter of language, but also a matter of life. One part of that work is to draw into our awareness and into language itself the unobvious and the unexpected.

Jane Hirshfield

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My obsessions tend to cluster, so I often have families of poems in which only a couple of them make it to the book. It can be satisfying to banish poems to my "crappy poems" file.

Anna Journey

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I had been dreaming a complicated dream about helping poets revise their poems, so that each ending would open like a flower. I was not arguing, but engaged in a rousing discussion.

Diane Wakoski

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Translated books rarely get reviewed in the press. Books or poems or works of art that don't seem to have a corresponding style or figure or theme, obviously they're hard to digest.

Elliott Colla

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I don't see much difference between prose poems and flash fiction (I've often taught the latter as the former), but then I also don't see that much difference between art and poetry.

Matthea Harvey

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I'm going to spend my life writing poems, turning them into music that will affect people and touch their hearts. I'm going to write the songs that people can't write for themselves.

Stevie Nicks

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I'm not religious. I love what Clive James said the other day. James is a brilliant writer, but he keeps on writing poems on stuff. And he said, "God doesn't have a leg to stand on."

Tom Courtenay

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You needn't tell a bird it's a bird. Or remind a fish of its purpose. It's only us who lose our way. We have names because we must. - from Golden Tongue: The Poems of Steven Slaughter

Maggie Stiefvater

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When I started reciting my own poems in public, I worried that it would seem too theatrical, but now I find recitation very natural, because it allows me to address audiences directly.

James Arthur

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Somewhere back a whiskey or so ago I wrote that thinking was a real thing in the world, just like anything else. I mean that very literally, materially. And it's true about poems, too.

Matthew Zapruder

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One of Walt Whitman's best-known poems is this one: When I heard the learn'd astronomer,.... The trouble is, Whitman is talking through his hat, but the poor soul didn't know any better

Isaac Asimov

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I work hard to make the poems as good as they can be, and if they're not good enough I scrap them. I find it difficult after a gap of a few years to tinker - I'm more likely to destroy.

Michael Longley

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Crows appear in many of my new unpublished poems. In these walks, they take on a symbolic life apart from their irritating, undeniable, interruptive presence. I figure them differently.

Shirley Geok-lin Lim

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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.

Shirley Geok-lin Lim

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We recognize that we cannot survive on meditation, poems and sunsets. We are restless. We have an irresistible urge to dip our hands into the stuff of the earth and do something with it.

Samuel Florman

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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.

Denise Duhamel

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There are some books in which every poem is a facet of the same thing. So the book is like a piece of music. And there are books of poems that I love so much that I carry them around with me.

Joan Larkin

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I'm filled with admiration, delight, and gratitude at discovering James Lasdun's poems in A Jump Start. He has wit, speed, intelligence, a keen eye, precision, and imagination of a high order.

Anthony Hecht

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Sometimes people come up and they get infatuated with some little brief imagistic poem or something, and they say, "Oh, I really like your Zen poems." And I say, "Which ones are not Zen poems?"

Sam Hamill

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I had no idea, when I was writing early on, that my poems would be published or read by anyone, never mind people I knew or would meet. I just wrote urgently - naÃ¯vely, I suppose, looking back.

Denise Duhamel

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I am furious at all the letters to answer, when all I want to do is think and write poems. ... I long for open time, with no obligations except toward the inner world and what is going on there.

May Sarton

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I don't know if we ever have enough distance to "see" our own trajectory. We're in the muddled middle of it. Who knows what will last, what poems will take hold of the imaginations of the future.

Dorianne Laux

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If there is anything I love most, in the poems I love, it is the audible braiding of that bravery, that essential empty-handedness, and that willingness to be taken by surprise, all in one voice.

Jorie Graham

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We must begin to understand the nature of intertextuality . . . the manner by which texts poems and novels respond to other texts. After all, all cats may be black at night, but not to other cats.

Henry Louis Gates

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The grotesque in my poems is the motion I use to put myself and the grotesque world together. So the miserable images I use in my poems are the same as the letters I send into the miserable world.

Kim Hyesoon

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Who, in the midst of passion, is vigilant against illness? Who listens to the reports of recently decimated populations in Spain, India, Bora Bora, when new lips, tongues and poems fill the world?

Lauren Groff

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I don't aspire, but I would be very happy if one of my poems suddenly offered someone a shady rest stop, a breather in our interminable march under the murderous, scorching heat of the superfluous.

Kiki Dimoula

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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.

Mariah Carey

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I was born into the century in which novels lost their stories, poems their rhymes, paintings their form, and music its beauty, but that does not mean I have to like that trend or go along with it.

Pat Conroy

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I judge wisely...as if nothin ever surprise me, Loungin, between two pillars of ivory. I'm lively, my dome piece is like buildin stones in Greece. My poems are deep, from ancient thrones I speak.

Killah Priest

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I like to go back and read poems that I wrote fifty years ago, twenty years ago, and sometimes they surprise me - I didn't know I knew that then. Or maybe I didn't know it then, and I know more now.

Maya Angelou

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In recent poems, I have abandoned the theme of not being able to write for an even more obsessive subject, the nature of language, particularly English, in the formation of my imagination and being.

Shirley Geok-lin Lim

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If politicians can't do it, I want to do it. We have to do it. Artists, put it in paintings. Poets, put it in poems, novels. That's what we have to do. And I think it's so important to save the world.

Michael Jackson

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... mathematics is very much like poetry ... what makes a good poem -- a great poem -- is that there is a large amount of thought expressed in very few words. In this sense formulas like or are poems.

Lipman Bers

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I believe in creative failing - to contine to write poems that fail and fail and fail until a day comes when you've got a thousand poems behind you and you're relaxed and you finally write a good poem.

Ray Bradbury

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We thought: we're poor, we have nothing, but when we started losing one after the other so each day became remembrance day, we started composing poems about God's great generosity and our former riches.

Anna Akhmatova

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Once outside the magic circle the writers became their lonely selves, pondering on poems, observing their fellow men ruthlessly, putting people they knew into novels; no wonder they were without friends.

Barbara Pym

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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.

Matthea Harvey

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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.

James Arthur

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I drank some coffee and my outlook improved immensely. I was ready to write some poems and, I don't know, get drunk, run around, take my shirt off and get kicked out of someplace. You know, live a little.

Michelle Tea

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I was writing poems as I was walking. I was able to take that restlessness, that nomadic distraction, and use that distraction in the world and turn that distraction into observations and then into poems.

Shirley Geok-lin Lim

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The pure playfulness of certain wholly whimsical portions of (Charles) Crosâs work should not obscure the fact that at the center of some of his most beautiful poems a revolver is leveled straight at us.

Andre Breton

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I came from a very avant-garde documentary kind of film making world. I like cinema veritÃ©, documentaries. I liked non-story, non-character tone poems. And that's the film making that I was interested in.

George Lucas

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Frederick Turner comes across in his poems as a man of impressively broad experience, intellectual brilliance, and originality. "¦ He's at his best when he unleashes his extraordinary powers of observation.

Richard Tillinghast

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Keats, it must be remembered, was a sensualist. His poems ... reveal him as a man not altogether free from the vulgarities of sensualism, as well as one who was able to transmute it into perfect literature.

Robert Wilson Lynd

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He felt himself in suspension between the two worlds, the warm, neat civilization behind his back, the cool, dark mystery outside. We all write poems; it is simply that poets are the ones who write in words.

John Fowles

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Though it does seem like I have written an immense amount of work, over the years I have pushed the pause button. I have poems that I haven't sent out for publication, mostly based on political/social issues.

Denise Duhamel

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Blumenthal goes straight to the heart in these poems. Gorgeously wrought, surprising, true, wise, elegiac, they leave me with a sense of having listened to Mozartâs Ave Verum Corpus. Who could ask for more?

Lynn Freed

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I don't want people to write programmatic environmental poems, but I think sustainability should become deeply a part of the consciousness of poetry - an impulse toward compassion, empathy, and social justice.

Alison Hawthorne Deming

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GIFT You tell me that silence is nearer to peace than poems but if for my gift I brought you silence (for I know silence) you would say This is not silence this is another poem and you would hand it back to me

Leonard Cohen

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The poems I did write there [in Harvard] include Alphabets the 1984 Phi Beta Kappa poem and A Sofa in the Forties. And, of course, the John Harvard poem for the 350th anniversary Villanelle for an Anniversary.

Seamus Heaney

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A lot of young poets today, from what I've heard and experienced, can't get their heads past George W. Bush, and I've heard so many poems about this democracy and this era of politics that I'm kind of bored by it

Amber Tamblyn

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I went for years not finishing anything. Because, of course, when you finish something you can be judged...I had poems which were re-written so many times I suspect it was just a way of avoiding sending them out.

Erica Jong

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Many moons ago dictionaries of quotations may have been less needed than they are today. In those good/bad old days, people walked around with entire poems and all the Shakespearean soliloquies in their heads....

Joseph Epstein

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I soon realized that poets do not compose their poems with knowledge, but by some inborn talent and by inspiration, like seers and prophets who also say many fine things without any understanding of what they say.

Socrates

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I can't go on flying apart just for those who want the benefit of a few verbal kicks. My God, do you know what poems like that cost? They're not written vicariously: they come out of actual suffering, real madness.

Theodore Roethke

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I want to write songs with complete sentences. I almos have this obsession with short-changing words. I would never be so pretentious to say that my lyrics are poetry. ... Poems are poems. Song lyrics are for songs.

Ben Gibbard

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A friend came over to the house a few days ago and read one of my poems. He came back today and asked to read the same poem over again. After he finished reading it, he said, It makes me want to write poetry.

Richard Brautigan

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Do you know, Considering the market, there are more Poems produced than any other thing? No wonder poets sometimes have to seem So much more businesslike than businessmen. Their wares are so much harder to get rid of.

Robert Frost

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Some poems are for holidays only. They are polished and sweet, but it is the sweetness of sugar, and not such as toil gives to sour bread. The breath with which the poet utters his verse must be that by which he lives.

Henry David Thoreau

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I like poems that immediately claim my attention, instead of taking my attention for granted. At first read, I want to feel compelled to pick up the poem again; I want to be curious about its byways and secret corners.

James Arthur

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In America they have to know just what you are-- novelist, poet, playwright... Well, I've been all of them... I think poems and novels and stories spring from the same seed. It's not like, say, playing polo and knitting.

Robert Penn Warren

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I remember in school - in elementary school - I used to recite poems. We'd have to recite poems. And I would always just, like, roll on the floor, like, just make it such a huge, melodramatic portrayal of whatever it was.

Cecile McLorin Salvant

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People live for love. They kill for love. They die for love. They have songs, poems, novels, sculptures, paintings, myths, legends. It's one of the most powerful brain systems on Earth for both great joy and great sorrow.

Helen Fisher

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As a reader I don't distinguish between confessional and non-confessional work. After all, how do we even know that certain "I" poems are confessional? It's a tricky business, this correlating of the speaker and the poet.

Matthea Harvey

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I have poetic failures all the time. Many failed poems. I try not to publish those, though some have slipped into each book, since I can't always tell they're failures until later... or I don't want to admit that they are.

Matthea Harvey

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He's probably their battle poet, too." "You mean he makes up heroic songs about famous battles?" "No, no. He recites poems that frighten the enemy....When a well-trained gonnagle starts to recite, the enemy's ears explode.

Terry Pratchett

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I like to work with multiple sections because they lend themselves to the structure of the poem: its intensifications and arcs and closures. I feel like working with smaller units feels more natural to the way I write poems.

Anna Journey

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There are many poets that use as my models. In my first book of poems, I had several for the "Sleepwalkers," I had several poems that were apprentice poems like this in which I take a walk with a poet who is no longer alive.

Edward Hirsch

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I thought about one of my favorite Sufi poems, which says that God long ago drew a circle in the sand exactly around the spot where you are standing right now. I was never not coming here. This was never not going to happen.

Elizabeth Gilbert

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Usually the poems are written in one sitting. There's always a groping towards some satisfying ending. But I'd say the hardest part is not writing. Once the writing starts, it's too pleasurable to think of it as a difficulty.

Billy Collins

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A lot of my poems are about how ill I am and how I probably won't live beyond next week. I publish a poem and everyone says 'cluck cluck, how wonderful, how brave', but then embarrassingly I'm still here! You see the problem?

Clive James

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Reread, rewrite, reread, rewrite. If it still doesn't work, throw it away. It's a nice feeling, and you don't want to be cluttered with the corpses of poems and stories which have everything in them except the life they need.

Helen Dunmore

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What would we not give for some great poem to read now, which would be in harmony with the scenery,--for if men read aright, methinks they would never read anything but poems. No history nor philosophy can supply their place.

Henry David Thoreau

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As a reader, coming to my reading as a writer immersed in fairytales, I cant help but notice in so many stories, plays, poems that I read, the sort of breadcrumbs of fairytale techniques, so Im very excited when I notice that.

Kate Bernheimer

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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.

Gwee Li Sui

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The architect who combines in his being the powers of vision, of imagination, of intellect, of sympathy with human need and the power to interpret them in a language vernacular and time--- is he who shall create poems in stone.

Louis Sullivan

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Mrs. James, my fifth-grade teacher, introduced us to some of the great literature of African American culture. I won my first blue ribbon reciting the vernacular poems of Paul Lawrence Dunbar, in particular "Little Brown Baby."

Michael Eric Dyson

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I've had people explain to me what one of my poems meant, and I've been surprised that it means that to them. If a person can use a poem of mine to interpret her life or his life, good. I can't control that. Nor would I want to.

Maya Angelou

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If poetry were nothing but texture, [Dylan] Thomas would be as good as any poet alive. The what of his poems is hardly essential to their success, and the best and most brilliantly written pieces usually say less than the worst.

Randall Jarrell

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These things, she felt, were not to be passed around like disingenuous party favors. She kept an honor code with her journals and her poems. 'Inside, inside,' she would whisper quietly to herself when she felt the urge to tell...

Alice Sebold

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I think, though, that perspective-awareness may follow from a kind of speaking that also came into my work more recently - the "assay" poems (some labeled that, some not) that engage an abstraction or object from multiple angles.

Jane Hirshfield

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Enjoy yourselves. And Hap: Don't let Umber near the arrows and bows; he's liable to shoot himself in the nose." Dodd grinned and snapped the reins, and the carriage rolled away. Umber sniffed. "One of his lesser poems. Come, Hap.

P.W. Catanese

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Publication there [in Nimbus] was to prove a turning pointâ¦ The publication of his next volume of verse, Come Dance with Kitty Stobling, was to be directly linked to the mini-collection in Nimbus, and his Collected Poems (1964)

Patrick Kavanagh

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...the characters in my books all resemble each other. They live, with minor variations, the same moments, the same perils, and when I speak of them, my language, which is inspired by them, repeats the same poems in the same tone.

Jean Genet

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The makers of fortunes have a second love of money as a creation of their own, resembling the affection of authors for their own poems, or of parents for their children, besides that natural love of it for the sake of use and profit.

Plato

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The poems ... are moments when I had the intensity to see, and the energy to build, some careful analog that completed the seeing. ... All I have been left is the exhausting habit of trying to tack up the slack in my life with words.

Samuel R. Delany

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The Gods have meant That I should dance And in some mystic hour I shall move to unheard rhythms Of the cosmic orchestra of heaven And you will know the language Of my wordless poems And will come to me For that is why I dance.

Ruth St. Denis

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Mandelstam's style is not singular. He could be stately and traditional, ribald and funny, hectic, elegiac. He could handle abstractions and ideas as well as Pope or Browning but then be so musical that other poems approach pure sound.

Christian Wiman

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I started off in England and very few people knew I was Australian. I mean, the clues were in the poems, but they didn't read them very carefully, and so for years and years I was considered completely part of the English poetry scene.

Peter Porter

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By being fictions and, at the same moment, returning their subjects to us with a compelling fidelity, both photographs and poems work with the same surprise... both strike us as if they were simultaneously remembrances and revelations.

Tod Papageorge

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That's how it is with relationships, it's a part of life, and all the great love songs and poems and films have been written by people who were standing where I was that morning as Simon shut the door. Doesn't make it any easier though.

Jane Green

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Everybody is different. Some comedy is more musical like Steven Wright. His is a pillar of comedy to me. He invented a whole form and all his jokes are poems. So it's different. I wanted to do it like George Carlin. Now I do it like me.

Louis C. K.

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Poems are not easy to start, and they're not easy to finish. There's a great pleasure in - I wouldn't say ease, but maybe kind of a fascinated ease that accompanies the actual writing of the poem. I find it very difficult to get started.

Billy Collins

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with poems one accomplishes so little when one writes them early. One should hold off and gather sense and sweetness a whole life long, a long life if possible, and then, right at the end, one could perhaps write ten lines that are good.

Rainer Maria Rilke

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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.

Jane Hirshfield

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When I edit the poems - and I do edit, which some people don't mean when they use the term "stream of consciousness" - I'm usually editing toward greater accuracy, which sometimes means more fragmentation, because that is the way I think.

Rachel Zucker

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I do not remember where I read that there are two kinds of poets: the good poets, who at a certain point destroy their bad poems and go off to run guns in Africa, and the bad poets, who publish theirs and keep writing more until they die.

Umberto Eco

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I've learned that my readings of others' work often has little connection to their intentions. This doesn't mean that my response is wrong, and it doesn't make the author's views less right. Poets, like their poems, are "hopeful monsters".

Alice Fulton

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I held her wrists and then I got it through the eyes: hatred, centuries deep and true. I was wrong and graceless and sick. all the things I had learned had been wasted. there was no creature living as foul as I and all my poems were false.

Charles Bukowski

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Reading one's own poems aloud is letting the cat out of the bag. You may have always suspected bits of a poem to be overweighted, overviolent, or daft, and then, suddenly, with the poet's tongue around them, your suspicion is made certain.

Dylan Thomas

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...we could think or feel as we wished toward the characters, or as the poet, discounting history, invited us to; we were the poet's guest, his world was his own kingdom, reached, as one of the poems told us, through the 'Ring of Words'...

Janet Frame

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The poet, by composing poems, uses a language that is neither dead nor living, that few people speak, and few people understand We are the servants of an unknown force that lives within us, manipulates us, and dictates this language to us.

Jean Cocteau

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By the age of nine I had a thorough knowledge of contemporary Polish literature as well as of foreign literature in Polish translation, and I began to write poems in honour of a lady of thirty years. Naturally, she knew nothing about them.

Wladyslaw Stanislaw Reymont

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I'm not musically trained and I'm not all these other things. I'm creative with a keyboard and a drum machine, but I can't really make these perfect minimal musical executions - all the things that would be nice with all these refined poems.

Doseone

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I try not to think in terms of what poems or poets should do. Most of us appreciate a wide diversity in music, in cooking, in movies, but in our own medium, poetry, we often fail to make allowances for tastes and projects other than our own.

James Arthur

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It is perfectly legitimate to write novels which are essentially prose poems, but in the end, I think, a novel is like a car, and if you buy a car and grow flowers in it, you're forgetting that the car is designed to take you somewhere else.

Robert Harris

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I like poems that are daggers that sing. I like poems that for all the power of the sentiments expressed, and all the power to upset and offend, are so well made that they're achieved things. However much they upset you, they also affect you.

Frederick Seidel

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I started then to try and shape something rather than just express it and when I started to shape something and to imitate other poems that were written by other people, when I had tried to integrate my reading and my writing I was on my path.

Edward Hirsch

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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.

Jandy Nelson

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Poems reach up like spindrift and the edge of driftwood along the beach, wanting! They derive from a slow and powerful root that we can't see. Stop the words now. Open the window in the center of your chest, and let the spirits fly in and out.

Rumi

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I have seen too many men wilt and go silly under a little light, and then they continue to write and get published, turning out pure crap under a name that has become a bad habit. The next poem is all that counts. You can't stand on past poems.

Charles Bukowski

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I write poems from dreams pretty frequently. It's limiting to think the poem has to come from a sensical lyric "I" stating things clearly or dramatically. This whole course is trying to say there are millions of ways to approach writing a poem.

Matthea Harvey

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Our analytical faculties allow us to look critically at our writing and interpret it. Sometimes we make bold, impulsive edits to our poems, but most forms of precision and economy in poetry, it seems to me, are signatures of the analytical mind.

James Arthur

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I think all poems are commissioned. They just come to me without somebody outside commissioning them. The idea comes and I will live with them 'til I get it as close to what I mean. I've never been totally satisfied. I've come close a few times.

Maya Angelou

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The "biggest" poems I ever made are based on the psychological principal of the "Johari Window:" what the self freely shares with others; what the self hides from others; what others hide from the self; and what is unknown to the self and others.

Denise Duhamel

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Poems, novels - these things belong to the nation, to the culture and the people. They've been stolen from the people and now the stolen things are being returned to their owners, but I don't think their owners should be grateful to receive them.

Joseph Brodsky

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I say that democracy can never prove itself beyond cavil, until it founds and luxuriantly grows its own forms of art, poems, schools, theology, displacing all that exists, or that has been produced anywhere in the past, under opposite influences.

Walt Whitman

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Carol Guess's poems are sexy, intuitive, angry, and hopeful. These lyrical narratives measure the impossibly small distance between love and fear. They are a reminder that we're all vulnerable little vessels filled by the people who can break us.

Zachary Schomburg

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I started writing as a child. But I didn't think of myself, actually writing until I was in college. And I had gone to Africa as a sophomore or something, no maybe junior and wrote a book of poems. And that was my beginning. I published that book.

Alice Walker

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When I was a freshman in college I went to Grinnell College in Iowa. I brought my poems to my freshman humanities teacher whose name was Carol Parsinan, a wonderful teacher. And Carol did a really great thing for me. She taught me more than anyone.

Edward Hirsch

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Slowly I would get to pen and paper, Make my poems for others unseen and unborn. In the day I would be reminded of those men and women, Brave, setting up signals across vast distances, considering a nameless way of living, of almost unimagined values.

Muriel Rukeyser

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My poems and prose are not often in direct conversation with each other, but there's so much crossover - everything that comes out of that crucible of language - that working in poetry and prose is energizing - to me as a writer and to the work itself.

Alex Lemon

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Delicate, gracious, and eloquent, John Brandi's poems reveal that he remains an extraordinary profound poet of prayer and praise. His is the most honorable and heroic of ambitions - to dress our broken world in the clothes of language, trust, and hope.

David St. John

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And when my second book had come out, "Wild Gratitude," I went to Pearl London's class and she worked through different drafts of poems and there were the drafts of my poem, Wild Gratitude, and I saw that I had begun the poem with the title August 13th.

Edward Hirsch

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Art-making is learned by immersion. You take in vocabularies of thought and feeling, grammar, diction, gesture, from the poems of others, and emerge with the power to turn language into a lathe for re-shaping, re-knowing your own tongue, heart, and life...

Jane Hirshfield

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If you have no love, do what you will - go after all the gods on earth, do all the social activities, try to reform the poor, the politics, write books, write poems - you are a dead human being. Without love your problems will increase, multiply endlessly.

Jiddu Krishnamurti

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If I were assigned poems I suppose I'd write more of them but it is entirely voluntary and for the most part ignored in the market sense of the word so the language to me is most intimate, most important, most sublime and most satisfying when it gets done.

Thomas Lynch

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You should go from place to place recovering the poems that have been written for you to which you can affix your signature. Don't discuss these matters with anyone. Retrieve. Retrieve. When the basket is full someone will appear to whom you can present it.

Leonard Cohen

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In every one of these haunting and hungry poems, Howell draws a map for how to enter the heat and dew of the human being, naked and facing the natural world, desperate to feel. I did not realize while reading Render how deeply I was handing everything over.

Nikky Finney

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Virtually every beginning poet hurts himself by an addiction to adjectives. Verbs are by far the most important things for poems-especially wonderful tough monosyllables like "gasp" and "cry." Nouns are the next most important. Adjectives tend to be useless.

Donald Hall

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If art doesn't require an audience, can an intimate conversation be a work of art? Can a thought be a work of art? Maybe. I don't know. These questions are completely hypothetical for me, because I love interacting with audiences. I want my poems to be heard.

James Arthur

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If more people recognized the difference between friendship and mere attraction, or how love must partake of both to prosper, I expect there'd be more happy people." "And a lot fewer poems and plays," I said, laughing as I splashed about in the scented water.

Sherwood Smith

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