“I think all poetry is accessible in a certain sense if you spend enough time with it.”
“I have poetic failures all the time. Many failed poems. I try not to publish those, though some have slipped into each book, since I can’t always tell they’re failures until later… or I don’t want to admit that they are.”
“I do love the prose poem because it’s such a perverse and provocative little box – always asking to be questioned, never giving a straight or definitive answer.”
“Poems can’t help but be personal. Mine are certainly an accurate blueprint of the things I think about, if not a record of my daily life.”
“To be a poet you have to experiment.”
“Poems tend to have instructions for how to read them embedded in their language.”
“I’m all over my poems, even if their relation to my everyday life is that of dream to reality.”
“Read widely (in and outside of your own genre), keep a notebook with you at all times. Do something that scares you every now and then. Try to locate your own frequency, knowing that one year your voice is on AM 532 and the next it’s on FM 92.8.”
“I’m interested in concrete poems – anything that complicates the line between the written and the visual.”
“As a reader I don’t distinguish between confessional and non-confessional work. After all, how do we even know that certain “I” poems are confessional? It’s a tricky business, this correlating of the speaker and the poet.”
“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.”
Paul's Poetry Playground 