I want to make a poem of my life.
I could never begin a poem: 'When I am dead' In case it tempted Fate, and Fate gave way.
The poem is a little myth of man's capacity of making life meaningful.
The mind is the great poem of winter, the man, Who, to find what will suffice, Destroys romantic tenements Of rose and ice.
Writing a poem is unwriting a knot, like untying a shoelace that is clubbing your foot.
However, if a poem can be reduced to a prose sentence, there can't be much to it.
I believed that I wanted to be a poet, but deep down I wanted to be a poem.
I have never started a poem yet whose end I knew. Writing a poem is discovering.
I have never felt a placard and a poem are in any way similar.
I don't think there's any law where you have to read a poem and immediately understand it.
Vores's settings fit Torgove's voice like a knife's sheath; they are alert to the harmony of every poem and to every shift of tonality within.
A beautiful poem is like a beautiful sky and a beautiful sky is like a beautiful poem!
There's a fine line between writing the poem and the poem writing itself. You have to be there and not be there, too.
I think you can perform any poem. But what I believe is that the best examples of spoken word poetry I've ever seen, are spoken word poems that, when you see them, you're aware of the fact they need to be performed. That there's something about that poem that you would not be able to understand if you were just reading it on a piece of paper.
In the eyes of others a man is a poet if he has written one good poem. In his own he is only a poet at the moment when he is making his last revision to a new poem. The moment before, he was still only a potential poet; the moment after, he is a man who has ceased to write poetry, perhaps forever.
As naturally as the oak bears an acorn and the vine a gourd, man bears a poem, either spoken or done.
A poem needs disguises. It needs secrets. It thrives on the tension between what is said and not said; it prefers the oblique, the implied, the ironic, the suggestive; when it speaks, it wants you to lean forward a little to overhear; it wants you to understand things only years later.
Art is a luxury. It's not necessary for you to - you can work your job and you can make some money and never know who Walt Whitman was, and never read a poem.
But Goethe tells us in his greatest poem that Faust lost the liberty of his soul when he said to the passing moment: "Stay, thou art so fair. " And our liberty, too, is endangered if we pause for the passing moment, if we rest on our achievements, if we resist the pace of progress. Change is the law of life. And those who look only to the past are certain to miss the future.
I think that the casual reader and the lyric and confession are trickily tied up together. I mean often when I read my students' poems my first impulse is to say, "O, the subject of this pronoun, this 'I,' is whatever kid wrote this poem. " The audience for lyric poems is "confessionalized" to some extent. And I think this audience tends to find long narrative poems, for instance, kind of bewildering.