Category: Great Quotes About Poetry
10 Great Quotes About Poetry and Writing By Pattiann Rogers
“Often when I write poetry I don’t quite know what I’m saying myself. I mean, I can’t restate the poem. The meaning of the poem is the poem.”
“I think parts of my soul have been saved by my writing, not in the sense of escaping death, but escaping the death of the moment, perhaps.”
“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.”
“Poetry is very playful with language. I think all poetry, at its heart, is playful. It’s doing unusual and playful things with the language, stirring it up. And prose is not doing that. Primarily it’s not attempting to do that.”
“I have thought for many years that the audience any creative writer imagines has a great effect on what gets written.”
“I’ve spent much of my life being attuned to watching for an image or a phrase that can trigger what might be a poem – could become a poem.”
“I approach writing a poem in a much different state than when I am writing prose. It’s almost as if I were working in a different language when I’m writing poetry. The words – what they are and what they can become – the possibilities of the words are vastly expanded for me when I’m writing a poem.”
“In poetry I can let the language go, allow an image that seems out of place to enter and see what happens, always listening to the music that’s being created, just like the world around us, never predictable, always shifting and intertwining, reflecting and echoing itself.”
“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.”
“From the beginning, I felt that I didn’t ever want to leave the impression that the process of writing a poem is totally mysterious. I couldn’t explain everything that went on in the creation of a poem, but I could try to explain as much as I knew. I thought readers deserved that. I didn’t want to set myself apart as being someone special.”
—Pattiann Rogers
10 Great Quotes About Poetry and Writing by Naomi Shahib Nye
“A poem is a cup of words open to the sky and wind in a bucket.”
“Read poems both like and unlike the ones you might write. Read widely, voraciously, open-heartedly. Read work by “others”—however you might define them. If you are a young poet, read work by older poets and vice versa. If you are urban, read poems by rural writers. Obviously, read poems by writers of other ethnicities, religions, etc.”
“The poem is not a closed experience, it remains open. It invites you in, hopefully.”
“For me, the writing process is something related to like exercising your body, taking a walk, stretching. It’s better if you do it on a regular basis. You won’t be as stiff, so all my life I’ve tried to write every day. It doesn’t have to be great. Doesn’t have to be even good. Just keep that pen rolling. Write down you know, whether you’re writing a journal of what’s been happening during the day or signs you saw that day or conversations you overhead.”
“Poetry [is] more necessary than ever as a fire to light our tongues.”
“More of childhood is poetry than adulthood will ever be. For children, the land of metaphor is still very close, very rich and available. Too much analysis of the dry kind ostracized generations of readers. No one listens to a jazz concert and goes out into the parking lot to analyze it. We bask. More basking in poetry has always been needed.”
“The act of writing itself often leads us into thinking in a larger, more universal way, after focusing on or breathing with, beginning with, something grounded and close. A poem “blurs” into that larger space of being on its own, if it is lucky. There is often a little “click” or “shiver” in a poet’s mind, I think, when an experience or a perception begins opening up into something larger – one can feel this during the act of writing, sometimes, or sometimes just as thoughts and images are gathering in the mind. Sometimes there is an impulse of something large first but we have no idea what it is until we begin writing through the scene itself, the details at hand.”
“If a teacher told me to revise, I thought that meant my writing was a broken-down car that needed to go to the repair shop. I felt insulted. I didn’t realize the teacher was saying, ‘Make it shine. It’s worth it.’ Now I see revision as a beautiful word of hope. It’s a new vision of something. It means you don’t have to be perfect the first time. What a relief!”
“I do think that all of us think in poems.”
“Anyone who says, “Here’s my address, write me a poem,” deserves something in reply. So I’ll tell you a secret instead: poems hide. In the bottoms of our shoes, they are sleeping. They are the shadows drifting across our ceilings the moment before we wake up. What we have to do is live in a way that lets us find them.”
— Naomi Shahib Nye
10 Great Quotes About Poets and Poetry by Percy Bysshe Shelley
“Poetry lifts the veil from the hidden beauty of the world, and makes familiar objects be as if they were not familiar.”
“Poetry is a mirror which makes beautiful that which is distorted”.
“Poets are the hierophants of an unapprehended inspiration; the mirrors of the gigantic shadows which futurity casts upon the present; the words which express what they understand not; the trumpets which sing to battle, and feel not what they inspire; the influence which is moved not, but moves.”
“All high poetry is infinite; it is as the first acorn, which contained all oaks potentially.”
“Poets are the unacknowledged legislators of the world.”
“Poetry is the record of the best and happiest moments of the happiest and best minds.”
“A poet is a nightingale, who sits in darkness and sings to cheer its own solitude with sweet sounds; his auditors are as men entranced by the melody of an unseen musician, who feel that they are moved and softened, yet know not whence or why.”
“Poetry, in a general sense, may be defined to be ‘the expression of the imagination’: and poetry is connate with the origin of man.”
“I consider poetry very subordinate to moral and political science.”
“A poet, as he is the author to others of the highest wisdom, pleasure, virtue, and glory, so he ought personally to be the happiest, the best, the wisest, and the most illustrious of men.”
—Percy Bysshe Shelley
10 Great Quotes About Poets, Poetry, and Writing by J. Patrick Lewis
“Poetry is the tunnel at the end of the light.”
“The poem is always more important than the poet. Poets biodegrade in short periods of time. If there’s any chance that the poem might have a half-life after the poet’s death, that’s wonderful. Not all of us are so lucky. Most of us return to ash, and so do our books after a short time.”
“Poetry is perfect verbs hunting for elusive nouns.”
“I have always believed that poems beg to be read aloud, even if the reader is in a world all her own.”
“You have to consider that when you’re writing a [biographical] poem, a person’s life has to be distilled. I think of it as a photograph in words of human experience, sort of personified emotion if you will. You know going into it that you don’t have to treat the person’s whole life. You can single out some anecdote of his or her life that speaks to the whole person, and that’s what I try to do. I just love writing biographical poems. I don’t claim that they are in any way competitive with full-blown biographies. But the whole idea is to get people, in reading poetry, to look for that “Aha!” moment, when they sit back and say, ‘Wow, I never thought of it that way before.’ ”
“Poetry is prose, bent out of shape.”
“You get up every day, saying to yourself you’re going to write great poetry. It doesn’t matter if you fail. The point is that you’re trying. If you’re not trying to write great poetry, if you’re satisfied to write middling poetry, then what is the point? “
“The reason I [rhyme] is that sound is every bit as important as sense.”
“I would say as far as choosing between free verse and rhyme, often times if I’m writing about a serious subject, I will choose free verse because free verse is invariably not funny. If you’re writing nonsense, half of the delight is the sound, is the rhyme. So I wouldn’t try and write a funny poem in free verse. I suppose it’s been done, but certainly not very often.”
“If poetry uses words in a way that nobody else has used them before, it has a chance of living on for a little while.”
— J. Patrick Lewis
10 Great Quotes About Poets, Poetry, and Writing by Matthea Harvey
“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.”
“Poetic success is when you write a poem that makes you excited and bewildered and aglow.”
“If I begin a poem, “I am a donkey,” reason kicks in and says, “She is taking on the persona of a donkey.” But if I write, “I have taken so many drugs I can’t see my feet,” the tendency is to take that as a confession on the part of the poet. Maybe that doesn’t matter. I’d almost prefer for it to be the other way round.”
“Usually form seems to find me in the process of writing a poem, though I have nothing against starting out with the form.”
“Writing a poem is always a process of subtracting: you start with all of language available to you, and you choose a smaller field.”
“In my own writing, I’ve mostly abandoned end-rhyme, but wordplay is still a huge part of my process.”
“Writing directly from a feeling of anger or sadness is difficult, but if you distract part of your brain with word games, the ignored emotion often tiptoes in.”
“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.”
“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.”
“When I start writing a poem, I can usually know quite early on whether it’s a lineated or prose poem, but I don’t think I can explain how. It’s like deciding whether to wear a skirt or a pair of pants.”
—Matthea Harvey
10 Great Quotes About Poets, Poetry, and Writing by Robert Penn Warren
“How do poems grow? They grow out of your life.”
“Real writers are those who want to write, need to write, have to write.”
“The urge to write poetry is like having an itch. When the itch becomes annoying enough, you scratch it.”
“If anybody’s going to be a writer, he’s got to be able to say, “This has got to come first, to write has to come first.” That is, if you have a job, you have to scant your job a little bit. You can’t be an industrious apprentice if you’re going to be a poet. You’ve got to pretend to be an industrious apprentice but really steal time from the boss. Or from your wife, or somebody, you see. The time’s got to come from somewhere. And also this passivity, this “waitingness,” has to be achieved some way. It can’t be treated as a job. It’s got to be treated as a non-job or an anti-job.”
“The poem is a little myth of man’s capacity of making life meaningful.”
“The poet is in the end probably more afraid of the dogmatist who wants to extract the message from the poem and throw the poem away than he is of the sentimentalist who says, “Oh, just let me enjoy the poem.””
“For what is a poem but a hazardous attempt at self-understanding: it is the deepest part of autobiography.”
“You have to be willing to waste time. When you start a poem, stay with it and suffer through it and just think about nothing, not even the poem. Just be there. It’s more of a prayerful state than writing the novels is. A lot of the novel is in doing good works, as it were, not praying. And the prayerful state is just being passive with it, mumbling, being around there, lying on the grass, going swimming, you see. Even getting drunk. Get drunk prayerfully, though.”
“The poem is not a thing we see; it is, rather, a light by which we may see.”
—Robert Penn Warren
10 More Great Quotes About Poets, Poetry, and Writing by Ezra Pound
“Here is our poetry, for we have pulled down the stars to our will.”
“Music begins to atrophy when it departs too far from the dance… poetry begins to atrophy when it gets too far from music.”
“Good writers are those who keep the language efficient. That is to say, keep it accurate, keep it clear.”
“Poetry must be as well written as prose.”
“Fundamental accuracy of statement is the ONE sole morality of writing.”
“Install me in any profession, save this damn’d profession of writing, where one needs one’s brains all the time.”
“No good poetry is ever written in a manner twenty years old, for to write in such a manner shows conclusively that the writer thinks from books, convention and cliché, not from real life.”
“Poetry is about as much a ‘criticism of life’ as red-hot iron is a criticism of fire.”
“The secret of popular writing is never to put more on a given page than the common reader can lap off it with no strain whatsoever on his habitually slack attention.”
“Colloquial poetry is to the real art as the barber’s wax dummy is to sculpture.”
—Ezra Pound
10 Great Quotes About Poetry, Writing, and Art by Gertrude Stein
“Poetry consists in a rhyming dictionary and things seen.”
“You will write if you will write without thinking of the result in terms of a result, but think of the writing in terms of discovery, which is to say that creation must take place between the pen and the paper, not before in a thought or afterwards in a recasting… It will come if it is there and if you will let it come.”
“Any time is the time to make a poem.”
“If the communication is perfect, the words have life, and that is all there is to good writing, putting down on the paper words which dance and weep and make love and fight and kiss and perform miracles.”
“Art isn’t everything. It’s just about everything.”
“Poetry is concerned with using with abusing, with losing with wanting, with denying with avoiding with adoring with replacing the noun. It is doing that always doing that, doing that and doing nothing but that. Poetry is doing nothing but using losing refusing and pleasing and betraying and caressing nouns. That is what poetry does, that is what poetry has to do no matter what kind of poetry it is. And there are a great many kinds of poetry.”
“Writing and reading is to me synonymous with existing.”
“After all everybody, that is, everybody who writes is interested in living inside themselves in order to tell what is inside themselves. That is why writers have to have two countries, the one where they belong and the one in which they live really. The second one is romantic, is is separate from themselves, it is not real but it is really there.”
“A writer should write with his eyes and a painter paint with his ears.”
“To write is to write is to write is to write is to write is to write is to write is to write.”
—Gertrude Stein
10 Great Quotes About Poetry, Writing, and Art by Charles Bukowski
“There is something about writing poetry that brings a man close to the cliff’s edge.”
“Most people are much better at saying things in letters than in conversation, and some people can write artistic, inventive letters, but when they try a poem or story or novel they become pretentious.”
“Writers are desperate people and when they stop being desperate, they stop being writers.”
“Bad poetry is caused by people who sit down and think “Now I am going to write a poem”.
“I should think that many of our poets, the honest ones, will confess to having no manifesto. It is a painful confession but the art of poetry carries its own powers without having to break them down into critical listings. I do not mean that poetry should be raffish and irresponsible clown tossing off words into the void. But the very feeling of a good poem carries its own reason for being… Art is its own excuse, and it’s either Art or it’s something else. It’s either a poem or a piece of cheese.”
“Literature, you know, is difficult for the average man to assimilate (and for the unaverage man too); I don’t like most poetry, for example, so I write mine the way I like to read it.”
“Great writers are indecent people; they live unfairly saving the best part for paper. Good human beings save the world so that bastards like me can keep creating art, become immortal. If you read this after I am dead, it means I made it.”
“Writing is like going to bed with a beautiful woman and afterwards she gets up, goes to her purse and gives me a handful of money.”
“The secret [to writing poetry] is writing down one simple line after another.”
“To me, Art (poetry) is a continuous and continuing process and that when a man fails to write good poetry he fails to live fully or well.”
—Charles Bukowski
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