10 Great Quotes About Poets, Poetry, and Writing by Ada Limón

“Poetry is a place where both grief and grace can live, where rage can be explored and examined, not simply exploited.”

“One question that I often get asked is how to overcome writer’s block. And the funny thing is, I overcome it, by not overcoming it. I think it’s okay to not write. I think it’s okay not to talk, not to make, not to create, not to produce, produce, produce. How can we listen to the world if we are always talking to the world?”

“I love poetry for numerous reasons, but one very essential reason is that poetry is the only creative writing art form that builds breath into it. It makes you breathe. It not only allows for silence, it demands it. We enter the poem with our own breath. For me, it’s also very simply about the units, the building blocks, of poems. The units of poetry begin with just the syllable, and then the phrase, then the line, then the stanza. It’s as much about the ear as it is the eye and it’s as much about the images and narrative as it is about pacing and rhythm. No other art form quite has that same mix of chaos and control. I love writing essays and I even write fiction from time to time, but the musicality of poetry, the breath and mystery and exactness of poetry, always wins.”

“I think poetry is a way of carrying grief, but it’s also a way of putting it somewhere so I don’t always have to heave it onto my back or in my body. The more I put grief in a poem, the more I am able to move freely through the world because I have named it, spoken it, and thrown it out into the sky.”

“It’s as important to infuse my poetry with joy as it is to infuse my life with joy. They are the same thing. My life. My poems. I lose joy sometimes. It makes me feel hopeless and it’s not a livable space. I need to point out the things that are good, that are worth living for, that make me laugh, the dog sleeping on my face in the morning, the smell of garlic and onions on the stove, the friend’s text that makes you laugh, the robin poking his head into the sprinkler, food and shelter, safety.”

“Some of my all-time favorite experiences of my life are staying up too late and talking about poetry with other poets or other poetry lovers. It’s like a drug. One person mentions a line of poem and then we have to look up another poem that goes along with it and soon we’re talking about books and meetings with older poets we admire and it’s addictive. I am grateful all the time for the community of writers that I call friends. I get to read their new poems and they do the honor of reading mine. I love it when a friends sends me a poem. I stop everything and read it immediately. I think poetry is something that really can only take place in the silence and isolation of the self, but we need to be reminded we aren’t alone. We need to have that friend that helps us to keep going.”

“Poetry is so vital and flourishing right now. People are getting turned on by poetry every day. I can feel it and I can see it first-hand. I think there’s an essential need for stories that aren’t easy or simple or solved. There’s a need for an art form that allows someone to stand inside of it, that lets people lean in and see into a person’s life without having to commodify suffering or personal pain for someone else’s pleasure. I love memoirs and novels, but we often want something big to happen in those forms, at least the market does. We desire a great trauma and then a recovery, a massive fight and then a solution, but poetry, poetry doesn’t do that. Thankfully. What it does is live in the liminal spaces. It’s not interested in showing off wounds for coins, it’s interested in living, day to day, breathing moment by moment and staring out into the sea and noticing the small thing and saying the real thing and because of that, I believe it’s the most human type of art form. It is messy and complex and real and doesn’t have any answers for us, for that reason, I think it’s something we can trust.”

“I think of poetry as the compression of language. A pressure cooker. Something distilled. And so whether or not the poem is lineated, what I am most interested in is the way the language is holding its truth. Have you ever been in a room with a couple you don’t know very well, but suddenly, by witnessing only one interaction you are able to discern so much about their entire relationship? That’s poetry to me, the moments in life where everything is revealed. A poem doesn’t have to have line breaks to do the work of revealing; what it does have to do is expose life in a new way, unearth a larger thing through one small moment. A reader only needs to know that the biggest difference between a lineated poem and a prose poem is pacing. The prose poem moves faster. It doesn’t have the line breaks to slow it down so it’s supposed to read like you’d read any piece of prose. The speed allows for a sort of surreality to take place, for the pressure cooker to get turned up.”

“Most poets I know, at one point or another, get asked the question, “What are your poems about?” And the truth is… all of the subjects are the same. We are all writing about the same things: grief, death, love, sex, desire, dreams, being alive, loneliness, nature, gratitude, pain, mortality, mortality, mortality, and so forth. How do we have answers to those big ticket topics? We don’t. We can only return to them again and again and dig our finger in the wound again. It seems after we surrender to that, there’s a way in which the poems are saying: I am here, I am here. That’s their great gift: we are simply shouting or whispering that we exist, and in doing so someone else might open a book or read a singular poem and think, “Oh wow, I exist too.” Sometimes that is all it is, and sometimes that is exactly enough.”

“One of the biggest things about poetry is that it holds all of humanity. It holds the huge and enormous and tumbling sphere of human emotions.”

—Ada Limón