10 Great Quotes About Poetry and Writing by Marianne Moore

May 22, 2019May 22, 2019 ~ Paul Szlosek ~ 1 Comment

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“Poetry is the art of creating imaginary gardens with real toads.”

“Writing is exciting and baseball is like writing. You can never tell with either how it will go.”

“Poetry is all nouns and verbs.”

“There is a great amount of poetry in unconscious fastidiousness.”

“Poetry is a peerless proficiency of the imagination.”

“Any writer overwhelmingly honest about pleasing himself is almost sure to please others.”

“Conscious writing can be the death of poetry.”

“I see no reason for calling my work poetry except that there is no other category in which to put it.”

“Writing is an undertaking for the modest.”

“One writes because one has a burning desire to objectify what it is indispensable to one’s happiness to express.”

10 Great Quotes About Poets, Poetry, and Writing by Paul Muldoon

May 18, 2019 ~ Paul Szlosek ~ Leave a comment

“The point of poetry is to be acutely discomforting, to prod and provoke, to poke us in the eye, to punch us in the nose, to knock us off our feet, to take our breath away.”

“If the poem has no obvious destination, there’s a chance that we’ll be all setting off on an interesting ride.”

“What I try to do is to go into a poem – and one writes them, of course, poem by poem – to go into each poem, first of all without having any sense whatsoever of where it’s going to end up.”

“That’s one of the great things about poetry; one realises that one does one’s little turn – that you’re just part of the great crop, as it were.”

“For whatever reason, people, including very well-educated people or people otherwise interested in reading, do not read poetry.”

“There’s very little of the intentional about the business of writing poetry, as least as far as I can see.”

“Form is a straitjacket in the way that a straitjacket was a straitjacket for Houdini.”

“I believe that these devices like repetition and rhyme are not artificial, that they’re not imposed, somehow, on the language.”

“We simply have not kept in touch with poetry.”

“Living at that pitch, on that edge, is something which many poets engage in to some extent.”

Invented Poetry Forms – The Streetbeatina

May 17, 2019May 17, 2019 ~ Paul Szlosek ~ 8 Comments

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I am so pleased to announce that for the very first time, one of the many poetry forms that I invented has been published somewhere other than this blog. At the end of last month, the prestigious online literary journal in a blog format Radius: Poetry From the Center to the Edge posted three of my streetbeatinas (I originally submitted two, but the editor requested a third) along with a short history and explanation of the form. The streatbeatina is one of the first poetic forms I ever created and a personal favorite of mine. Normally, I would now give instructions on how to write one, and show a few examples, but I figure that would be redundant, since all you need to know about the streetbeatina can be found at radiuslit.org. Please check it out, and let me know what you think by either leaving a comment on Radius or back here on this blog. I would really appreciate it, and hope you will be inspired to try writing a streetbeatina of your own (warning: it will be a challenge, but I think you will enjoy it).

10 Great Quotes About Poets, Poetry, and Writing by Yusef Komunyakaa

May 11, 2019May 11, 2019 ~ Paul Szlosek ~ 3 Comments

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“Poetry helps me understand who I am. It helps me understand the world around me. But above all, what poetry has taught me is the fact that I need to embrace mystery in order to be completely human.”

“Poetry is a process of getting back to the unconscious. Hence, I am always writing-even when I’m not facing the white space. I feel writers are like reservoirs of images. We take in what is around us.”

“I like connecting the abstract to the concrete. There’s a tension in that. I believe the reader or listener should be able to enter the poem as a participant. So I try to get past resolving poems.”

“It wasn’t a deliberate decision to become a poet. It was something I found myself doing – and loving. Language became an addiction.”

“I define poetry as celebration and confrontation. When we witness something, are we responsible for what we witness? That’s an on-going existential question. Perhaps we are and perhaps there’s a kind of daring, a kind of necessary energetic questioning. Because often I say it’s not what we know, it’s what we can risk discovering.”

“Poets are seen as the caretakers of language, so working with words no matter what the form is what we do.”

“Students often have such a lofty idea of what a poem is, and I want them to realize that their own lives are where the poetry comes from. The most important things are to respect the language; to know the classical rules, even if only to break them; and to be prepared to edit, to revise, to shape.”

“Poetry is a kind of distilled insinuation. It’s a way of expanding and talking around an idea or a question. Sometimes, more actually gets said through such a technique than a full frontal assault.”

“There’s a sameness about American poetry that I don’t think represents the whole people. It represents a poetry of the moment, a poetry of evasion, and I have problems with this. I believe poetry has always been political, long before poets had to deal with the page and white space . . . it’s natural.”

“I think of my poems as personal and public at the same time. You could say they serve as psychological overlays. One fits on top of the other, and hopefully there’s an ongoing evolution of clarity.”

— Yusef Komunyakaa

10 More Great Quotes About Poets, Poetry, and Writing by Mary Oliver

May 4, 2019 ~ Paul Szlosek ~ 6 Comments

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“Writers sometimes give up what is most strange and wonderful about their writing – soften their roughest edges – to accommodate themselves toward a group response.”

“I want to write something so simply about love or about pain that even as you are reading you feel it and as you read you keep feeling it and though it be my story it will be common, though it be singular it will be known to you so that by the end you will think— no, you will realize— that it was all the while yourself arranging the words, that it was all the time words that you yourself, out of your heart had been saying.”

“I consider myself kind of a reporter – one who uses words that are more like music and that have a choreography. I never think of myself as a poet; I just get up and write.”

“I decided very early that I wanted to write. But I didn’t think of it as a career. I didn’t even think of it as a profession… It was the most exciting thing, the most powerful thing, the most wonderful thing to do with my life.”

“I have a notebook with me all the time, and I begin scribbling a few words. When things are going well, the walk does not get anywhere; I finally just stop and write.”

“It was not a choice of writing or not writing. It was a choice of loving my life or not loving my life. To keep writing was always a first priority…. I worked probably 25 years by myself…. Just writing and working, not trying to publish much. Not giving readings. A longer time than people really are willing to commit before they want to go public.”

“It is no use thinking that writing of poems – the actual writing – can accommodate itself to a social setting, even the most sympathetic social setting of a workshop composed of friends. It cannot. The work improves there and often the will to work gets valuable nourishment and ideas. But, for good reasons, the poem requires of the writer not society or instruction, but a patch of profound and unbroken solitude.”

“I’ve always wanted to write poems and nothing else.”

“Writing a poem … is a kind of possible love affair between something like the heart (that courageous but also shy factory of emotion) and the learned skills of the conscious mind.”

“… to write well it is entirely necessary to read widely and deeply. Good poems are the best teachers.”

–Mary Oliver

10 Great Quotes About Poetry and Writing by Anne Sexton

April 28, 2019April 28, 2019 ~ Paul Szlosek ~ 3 Comments

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“Poetry to me is prayer.”

“When I’m writing, I know I’m doing the thing I was born to do.”

“A woman who writes feels too much.”

“Craft is a trick you make up to let you write the poem.”

“It’s a little mad, but I believe I am many people. When I am writing a poem, I feel I am the person who should have written it.”

“All I am is the trick of words writing themselves.”

“The beautiful feeling after writing a poem is on the whole better even than after sex, and that’s saying a lot.”

“I think of myself as writing for one person, that one perfect reader who understands and loves.”

“I think I’ve been writing black poems all along, wearing my white mask. I’m always the victim … but no longer!”

“I keep feeling that there isn’t one poem being written by any one of us – or a book or anything like that. The whole life of us writers, the whole product I guess I mean, is the one long poem – a community effort if you will. It’s all the same poem. It doesn’t belong to any one writer – it’s God’s poem perhaps. Or God’s people’s poem.”

— Anne Sexton

10 Great Quotes About Poets, Poetry, and Writing by Kenneth Koch

April 24, 2019April 24, 2019 ~ Paul Szlosek ~ 9 Comments