Poem Quotations

One of my favorite passages in 'Leaves of Grass,' that breathless, exuberant poem so rich and full of innocence and joy and generosity and compassion, is 'Mannahatta.'

If you've ever been to a poetry slam, you know that the highest scoring emotion is self-righteous indignation: how dare you judge me. So in that way, the poem, 'What Teachers Make,' is an absolutely formulaic slam poem designed to allow me to get up on my soap box and say, 'Let me tell you what really makes me angry.'

I was in juvenile detention center, and I was in Rikers Island. And there was an anthology written by the inmates called 'The Pen,' and I - you know, I had a crush on a girl, and she left me when I was incarcerated. And I found this poem in this anthology that talked about having your heart broken and being incarcerated.

The divine spark leaps from the finger of God to the finger of Adam, whether it takes ultimate shape in a law of physics or a law of the land, a poem or a policy, a sonata or a mechanical computer.

What I responded to, on the page, was the way a poem could liberate, by means of a word's setting, through subtleties of timing, of pacing, that word's full and surprising range of meaning. It seemed to me that simple language best suited this enterprise.

My favourite poem is called 'Roots and Wings' - it's a very moving poem about how if you've got real roots you can fly.

The animal encounter poem is now so distinct a genre that it would be possible to create a full-length anthology from deer encounter poems alone, and many varieties of experience would emerge from such an exercise.

When I think of Emily Dickinson, there's not one particular poem of hers that jumps out, but I do have a very vivid image of an ill woman with giant eyes who wants to write about the sun exploding.

To me, a poem that's in rhyme and meter is the difference between watching a film in full color and watching a film in black and white. Not that a few black and white films aren't wonderful. So are certain successful pieces of free verse.

In my relationship with a young guy I was going with in a band - his name was Sylvester, and I think he had another little girl on the side - I told him, 'If you lose me, you're going to lose a good thing.' And I went home and put that poem to music.

The poem 'What Teachers Make' is not without its detractors. This one person wrote to me and said: 'Gee, Mr. Mali. You don't possibly have a teacher-God complex, do you?' And that was the first time I'd ever heard of that expression. So, yeah, I'm sure I have a teacher-God complex.

Every time you read a poem aloud to yourself in the presence of others, you are reading it into yourself and them. Voice helps to carry words farther and deeper than the eye.

To a poet the mere making of a poem can seem to solve the problem of truth, but only a problem of art is solved in poetry.

Sometimes, I think the best kind of poem is one in which there is an acute balance between what is humorous and that which is very serious. That balance is very hard to strike. But it can be done.

I think the biggest thing that I have to do is to remind people that poetry is there for us to turn to not only to remind us that we're not alone - for example, if we are grieving the loss of someone - but also to help us celebrate our joys. That's why so many people I know who've gotten married will have a poem read at the wedding.

If you're writing a song, you have to write something that can be understood serially. When you're reading a poem that's written for the page, your eye can skip up and down. You can see the thing whole. But you're not going to see the thing whole in the song. You're going to hear it in series, and you can't skip back.

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.

My first spoken word poem, packed with all the wisdom of a 14-year-old, was about the injustice of being seen as unfeminine. The poem was very indignant, and mainly exaggerated, but the only spoken word poetry that I had seen up until that point was mainly indignant, so I thought that that's what was expected of me.

Poetry for me is very easy. It's like a lightning bolt. I feel this calling, and the first line of the poem comes into my head, and I just have to go to the page, to the typewriter, to the computer or whatever and write it.

I think poetry is the only domain where a writer you like can truly be said to influence you, because you read and reread a poem so many times that it simply drills itself into your head.

One of my greatest joys is poetry. I read it almost every day, and I've even taken a stab at writing some of my own. A poem I wrote for my mother when she was dying really helped me get through that hard time.

The first test any poem must pass is no longer, 'Is it true to nature?' but a criterion looking in a different direction: namely, 'Is it sincere? Is it genuine?'

The experiment of poetry, as far as I am concerned, happens when the poem carries you beyond where you could have reasonably expected to go.

With vocal and choral music, first and foremost, it's the text. Not only do I need to serve the text, but the text - when I'm doing it right - acts as the perfect 'blueprint', and all the architecture is there. The poet has done the heavy lifting, so my job is to find the soul of the poem and then somehow translate that into music.

That is the best instruction you could ever give a poet: whether you're examining a bad line in a poem or a bad motive for action, keep well your repining - meaning, don't ignore the honest muttering in your head.

At each moment, a poem might grow into a totally different shape. It is not so much like working in a garden. It is more as if you remade the garden every day.

A poem I write is not just about me; it is about national identity, not just regional but national, the history of people in relation to other people. I reach for these outward stories to make sense of my own life, and how my story intersects with a larger public history.

People are so used to reading novels now, they just read a poem straight through to get the meaning. And that's something totally different from the slow way you read something if it's a tune; which to me a poem has to be.

I don't think I've ever written a poem whose intention was just to be funny. I've written poems that start out funny and often shift into something more serious.

My father, Eric Trethewey, is a poet, so I had one right inside the house. And on long trips, he'd tell me, if I got bored in the car, to write a poem about it. And I did find that poetry was a way for me, I think as it for a lot of people, to articulate those things that seem hardest to say.

I think it's good not to make demands on the reader too early. But as the poem goes on, I want the journey of the poem to lead into some interesting places.

When I'm actually writing by hand, I get more of a sense of the rhythm of sentences, of syntax. The switch to the computer is when I actually start thinking about lines. That's the workhorse part. At that point, I'm being more mathematical about putting the poem on the page and less intuitive about the rhythm of the syntax.

I try to write very fast. I don't revise very much. I write the poem in one sitting. Just let it rip. It's usually over in twenty to forty minutes. I'll go back and tinker with a word or two, change a line for some metrical reason weeks later, but I try to get the whole thing just done.

When you put a poem on a Kindle, the lines are broken in order to fit on the screen. And so instead of being the poet's decision, it becomes the device's decision.

America is a poem in our eyes; its ample geography dazzles the imagination, and it will not wait long for metres.

'Two Voices,' from my album with Peter Schwalm, is an intact dream-poem. I awoke one night with an image of a piece of paper and all the words of the poem written on it, so I just blundered down to the kitchen table and 'copied it out.'

Only one English poet of our own day, and that a minor one, has attempted to make the poem of four lines a specialty - that is William Watson.

One reason to write a poem is to flush from the deep thickets of the self some thought, feeling, comprehension, question, music, you didn't know was in you, or in the world.

One day You will take my heart completely and make it more fiery than a dragon. Your eyelashes will write on my heart the poem that could never come from the pen of a poet.

Poe's saying that a long poem is a sequence of short ones is perfectly just.

Poetry, as odd as it is, and as hard to figure out as it is, many times, it's almost something that we're used to. It's kind of like a dream language that we had centuries ago, so that when we speak poetically or write a poem about what's going on, a real difficult issue that's facing our communities, people listen.

Poetry is a lousy form of activism; it doesn't really change much. And maybe we can point to one or two historical times when a poem has started a revolution or a rebellion or an uprising, but it doesn't happen that often, and if you put the number of poems next to the number of political acts, it would be pretty slim.

Poetry is a pure meritocracy. There's no room for ambiguity: either a poem moves you and opens up new vistas in life, or it doesn't. It's completely objective, and the best always rise to the top.

No poem is easily grasped; so why should any reader expect fast results?

I go to the gym, do some martial arts, and I love poetry. I have a tattoo of my family crest, and another on my back that says 'The Road Not Taken,' which is a poem by Robert Frost.

I got the writing bug in the fourth grade when a poem of mine was published in the school newspaper. Music criticism came a little later, when I was in high school.

Life, for all its agonies of despair and loss and guilt, is exciting and beautiful, amusing and artful and endearing, full of liking and love, at times a poem and a high adventure, at times noble and at times very gay; and whatever (if anything) is t

Many chapters are headed by poem quotations. These epigraphs are another way of shining light on what is happening at this stage of the novel.

To produce and direct a movie today, a man really ought to have two heads. It is like trying to be a traffic cop and write a poem at the same time. You need an executive head to handle all the vast paraphernalia of movie-making. You need another, more sensitive head to get the delicate human emotional values you are trying to put on film.

I couldn't help being a part of my race. A race that continued to be tough. It was possible for me to accept myself, finally, only when I realized-emotionally-that poetry is tough too, that a poem can contain as much fury and power as a fist or a blackjack.

I did a short film at Outfest, 'Where Are the Dolls,' based on an Elizabeth Bishop poem done, where I play this woman who is sort of walking the streets and ends up alone dancing in a club. I have this hot and heavy scene with a very beautiful actress. It became very popular.

From the letters, people would certainly learn more about how a poem is made, ... They may learn more about iambic pentameter than they ever wished.

But all they want to do Is tie the poem to a chair with rope And torture a confession out of it. They begin beating it with a hose To find out what it really means.

But all they want to doIs tie the poem to a chair with ropeAnd torture a confession out of it.They begin beating it with a hoseTo find out what it really means.

He was a reflection of what was going on. The poem 'Howl' was a howl against the hypocrisy and silence of the generations of the 1950s -- of the people who failed to perform their function as real elders.

Imagine writing a poem with a sweating, worried-looking boy handing you a different pencil at the end of every word. My golf, you may say, is no poem; nevertheless, I keep wanting it to be one.

The painter turns a poem into a painting; the musician sets a picture to music.

I find in my own writing that only fiction - and rarely, a poem - fully tests me to the kind of limits of what I know and what I feel.

We took Beowulf, the epic poem in Old English, and put it right together with John Gardner's contemporary retelling. If you bring it into today, we really feel that it has something very fresh to say now.

I was actually a poetry major in college before I punted and decided to become a theater major. I wrote the poem that we put on the sauerkraut boxes in the style of Elling.

I write slowly, and I write many, many drafts. I probably have to work as hard as anyone, and maybe harder, to finish a poem. I often write a poem over years, because it takes me a long time to figure out what to say and how best to say it.

I write to satisfy the story or poem or piece of fascinating research that speaks to me. To rub a sore, to resonate with joy, to answer a question no one else has satisfactorily answered for me.

John would usually do a poem in one take. He claimed to be completely unmusical, but he wasn't really. He liked Victorian hymns and music-hall. I never heard him mention contemporary pop music, but we had in some really good rock-guitar session men and he was very happy with that. He would just sit there and look around. He seemed to think everyone was doing a good job and seemed very happy with proceedings.

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

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

Judge a poem like you would judge a person, for it was the person who wrote the poem.

I think the category between fiction and non-fiction is nothing. The poetry of non-fiction is as fabulous as any poetry you could ever write in fiction. Poets have greatly influenced me. The only difference between the novel as poem and the lyric as poem is the difference in length.

We don't compare. It's not my poem is better than yours. We're like a chorus. Some sing alto, some sing baritone, some sing bass.

We'd go in there without much of an idea and sit and discuss. They evolved in the studio itself. Directions would appear, and it often fell to me to write the poem that connected the dots.

This string sextet by Schoenberg is based on a Viennese poem in which a women walks with her lover under the moon and confesses that she is pregnant by another man. The man tells his love he will stay with her no matter what and raise the child. The arc of the piece moves from abject sorrow and guilt to joy and underscores the transformative power of love and commitment.

The experiment of the poem is mostly intuitive. I write the first draft, pulling in the various elements that interest me, in the hope that their being combined will lead to some kind of insight.

Working alone on a poem, a poet is of all artists the most free. The poem can be written with a modicum of technology, and can be published, in most cases, quite cheaply.

When I was in Marine training I memorised 'The Waste Land,' which was a significant experience in terms of really breaking apart language and thinking about how the different voices in that poem function.

The poem builds in my mind and sits there, as if in a register, until the poem, or a piece of a longer poem, is finished enough to write down. I can hold several lines in my head for quite some time, but as soon as they are written down, the register clears, as it were, and I have to work with what is on the paper.

The poem is a little myth of man's capacity of making life meaningful. And in the end, the poem is not a thing we see-it is, rather, a light by which we may see-and what we see is life.

The poem is much more about pure good versus pure evil. Whereas the movie, Beowulf goes to take on this troll who they all perceive as a demon and filthy and ignorant and sadistic, only to discover that that's not actually the case.

The poem is the point at which our strength gave out.

The poem, to me (until I go broke) is an attempt, an experiment, a failing experiment, toward assertion with broken means but an assertion, always, of a new and total culture, the lifting of an environment to expression. Thus it is social, the poem is a social instrument.

Aside from the physical sensation of hiking the Trail, it became a real intellectual adventure, too - because I was always reading and writing while I was up there. I had lots to think about during the day while I was putting in the miles. I'd be thinking, Oh, Robert Frost was here, and let me think about this Frost poem and this place. It made for some really interesting mind work while I was walking.

What I wanted was to write a better love poem than the last, and when that didn't happen it killed me.

I've been writing since I was sixteen. At first, I wrote mostly short stories and poetry. The first thing I ever had published was a poem about a football game. It was printed in my local newspaper.

You can tear a poem apart to see what makes it tick... You're back with the mystery of having been moved by words. The best craftsmanship always leaves holes and gaps... so that something that is not in the poem can creep, crawl, flash or thunder in.

The rules or 'laws' of poetry are only tentative devices, an approximate scheme. There is no Sinaitic recipe for poetry, for the individual poem is the norm.

The wonderful 17th Century poet, Robert Herrick, wrote a poem entitled, 'To Live Merrily and to Trust to Good Verses.' Easy to say, Robert Herrick; not always easy to do. But it's a good slogan, I think.

The term 'epitaph' itself means 'something to be spoken at a burial or engraved upon a tomb.' When an epitaph is a poem written for a tomb, and appears in a book, we are aware that we are not reading it in its proper form: we are reading a reproduction. The original of the epitaph is the tomb itself, with its words cut into the stone.

Reading a poem aloud to an audience is gestural as much as precise.

After the Fall was written mainly as a joke. It wasn't a personal love poem at all, I was just feeling fed up with housekeeping and children.

At Holyrood's official opening ceremony, Scotland's Poet Laureate Edwin Morgan told us in his poem of the same name to 'Open the Doors!' and we are doing exactly that.

Sometimes it's like that. I go, 'You know what? I'm going to just change scales. I'm going to even change instruments. And I'm going to go into the chromatics of the Spanish language,' and I do. You know, the poem is totally different. It's like a lunar voice versus a day voice, a solar voice.

Why need every honest poet be suspected of leading a quadruple life? Sometimes the second or third meaning is less interesting than the first, and the only really difficult thing about a poem is the critic's explanation of it

This is one more surprise for people in this area; we not only had a Nobel Prize winner, but a Pulitzer Prize winner, and he even wrote a poem that mentioned New York Avenue, in Union City. I hope that as a result of these articles, the city residents will become interested in learning about all the people and things and places that we can call 'our own' and should respect and honor.

I love to compare different time frames. Poetry can evoke the time of the subject. By a very careful choice of words you can evoke an era, completely throw the poem into a different time scale.

Once in a while and really the exception, will be when I have an idea, then I'll write a poem first and then write a tune to the poem.

No that was like the fifth time. The first time was when I was on TNT before that. The second time I was on TNT, I told them that I had a poem for Lord Alfred Hayes. Now it's been taken off the WWE website but I managed to get it on the LannyPoffo.com website.

Daydreaming is one of the key sources of poetry - a poem often starts as a daydream that finds its way into language - and walking seems to bring a different sort of alertness, an associative kind of thinking, a drifting state of mind.

I wanted to write a poem that you would understand. For what good is it to me if you can't understand it?

In the borders there's clues. Actually we had to solve the poem clues first.

By the time Allen read 'Howl' -- and when Snyder then read 'The Berry Feast,' the first deep-ecology poem -- we felt that a body had been thrown against the barricades," ()

A poem can have an impact, but you can't expect an audience to understand all the nuances.

A poem conveys not a message so much as the provenance of a message, an advent of sense.