10 More Great Quotes About Poets, Poetry, and Writing by Denise Duhamel

“My job as a poet is to say what is too hard to say in everyday conversation and to try to say it as beautifully and urgently as I can.”

“I think our society is set up as so anti-poetry. Corporations, having to make a living – Having to make a living is really the hardest – I mean, that’s really anti-poetry, or the enemy of poetry.”

“The joy of writing poetry and the freedom of writing poetry is that no one wants it, so that you can write whatever you want. You know, Coke or Pfizer is not going to say, well, we have to censor that part. The joy is you can do anything you want because so few people are “listening”. And then that is also the inherent sadness of poetry, that you have tiny audiences and are marginalized. But I think there’s a freedom to writing poetry that’s really great, that it’s not a commodity.”

“I love the intensity of short poems, and, for me, these are the hardest to write. They don’t come naturally to me as I am a chatterbox, in poetry and in real life.”

“Poetry is a place where words are there to help people live, to say something sublime. Poets aren’t selling anything, not even their books really, as you can hear people read poems for free on Vimeo or YouTube.”

“I am a big proponent of “freewriting” and I use either a journal or my laptop to “free write” every day for at least twenty minutes. Some days are purely awful and some are just rants about politics. As you can imagine, there are a lot of those these days. I don’t judge myself though as I go along and sometimes it takes me a month or more before I even go back and reread anything I’ve written. Then I highlight what might be useful for poems—lines or images—and sometimes around day 12 there is just an almost finished poem and the next day is gibberish or wordplay exercises. When I have long stretches of time to sit down and write, I always have my freewriting to get me going so I don’t have to start with a blank page.”

“I almost always come up with my titles after the poems are written. I am a fan of long titles and provocative titles and the occasional exclamation point.”

“I started wanting desperately to say something, to make a point, to be heard – and I still feel that way. Free verse served me best when I embarked on poetry.”

“I don’t think it’s important that all poetry is plainspoken and I think there is definitely room for the elliptical and experimental in poetry. But, for me, clarity and accessibility are my goals; I really want to communicate feelings, even political ideas. My project is to write a poetry that can be understood by anyone who picks up my book.”

“Unlike Woody Allen, I would be happy to be part of any (poetry) club that would have me.”

—Denise Duhamel