I find purer philosophy in a Poem than in a Conclusion of Geometry, a chemical analysis, or a physical law
If a poem is each time new, then it is necessarily an act of discovery, a chance taken, a chance that may lead to fulfillment or disaster
the truth of a poem is its form and its content, its music and its meaning are the same.
He has turned defensive boxing into a poetic art. Trouble is, nobody ever knocked anybody out with a poem.
A poem is a flexible thing, and a poem is a poem.
A poem is good if it contains a new analogy and startles the reader out of the habit of treating words as counters.
There's a fine line between writing the poem and the poem writing itself. You have to be there and not be there, too.
The pleasure we feel, reading a poem, is our assurance of its integrity.
If you know what you are going to write when you're writing a poem, it's going to be average.
I began to think about the extent to which nude and semi-nude female bodies are commonplace in our present day culture and how young girls might be affected. I wondered if, at some point, this bombardment of images could possibly get boring and that concealing - rather than revealing - would awaken sexual desire. I don't think that will ever be the case, of course, but I was intrigued to write a poem in which dressing was just as erotic as undressing.
We are all writing God's poem.
When clever people ask me where I get a poem, I despair.
Music straightjackets a poem and prevents it from breathing on its own, whereas it liberates a lyric. Poetry doesn't need music; lyrics do.
I stalk certain words. . . I catch them in mid-flight, as they buzz past, I trap them, clean them, peel them, I set myself in front of the dish, they have a crystalline texture to me, vibrant, ivory, vegetable, oily, like fruit, like algae, like agates, like olives. . . I stir them, I shake them, I drink them, I gulp them down, I mash them, I garnish them. . . I leave them in my poem like stalactites, like slivers of polished wood, like coals, like pickings from a shipwreck, gifts from the waves. . . Everything exists in the word.
Love Poem ـــــــــ It's so nice to wake up in the morning all alone and not have to tell somebody you love them when you don't love them any more.
To read a poem is to hear it with our eyes; to hear it is to see it with our ears.
Most poets who have little or nothing to say are concerned primarily with the way in which they say it. . . if it is true that the style of a poem and the poem itself are one,. . . it may be. . . that the poets who have little or nothing to say are, or will be, the poets that matter.
I don't think there's any law where you have to read a poem and immediately understand it.
For me, a poem is an opportunity to kind of interrogate myself a little bit.
If there would be a recipe for a poem, these would be the ingredients: word sounds, rhythm, description, feeling, memory, rhyme, and imagination. They can be put together a thousand different ways, a thousand, thousand. . . more.