“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.”
“In almost every book I’ve written, there is a reference to a movie – legendary films, actors and actresses, and forgotten made-for-TV movies. The leaps poems make are not unlike the cuts in a film. The miniature and avant-garde prose poets have perhaps the most obvious ties to film, as a prose poem in its shape is not unlike a movie screen.”
“I believe it’s impossible to write good poetry without reading. Reading poetry goes straight to my psyche and makes me want to write. I meet the muse in the poems of others and invite her to my poems. I see over and over again, in different ways, what is possible, how the perimeters of poetry are expanding and making way for new forms.”
“What has stayed true in my life as a writer is my dedication to writing – I try to write every day, no matter what – and the joy that writing has given me.”
“The “biggest” poems I ever made are based on the psychological principal of the “Johari Window:” what the self freely shares with others; what the self hides from others; what others hide from the self; and what is unknown to the self and others.
“Writing is performative – and while, yes, the words in essence will be there “forever,” poems are often about ecstatic moments rather than trying to pin down a particular truth of an event.”
“The “truth” is the poem itself. Just because someone writes a poem about a feeling she has does not mean that the feeling will stay forever. The truth of the emotion of the poem remains, even if the particular truth of the poet changes.”
“I don’t know if there are topics that I unconsciously avoid, but as soon as they pop up in my writing, I try to take on those topics, whether or not I publish the poems.”
“Over the years, I became more and more interested in the forms and techniques in which things could be said.”
“My advice to my younger self would have been, ‘Chill. Concentrate on the poems. Everything else will work itself out.’ “
“I know writers for whom the act of writing is a necessary chore. They suffer to write great work. I am very lucky that for me writing is a delight.”
Paul's Poetry Playground 