My poems and prose are not often in direct conversation with each other, but there's so much crossover - everything that comes out of that crucible of language - that working in poetry and prose is energizing - to me as a writer and to the work itself.
Macmillan's rejection had left him very downcast. . . Patrick Swift was invited to peruse the contents and decided that the poems should be published.
I'm not religious. I love what Clive James said the other day. James is a brilliant writer, but he keeps on writing poems on stuff. And he said, "God doesn't have a leg to stand on. "
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.
Try to write poems at least one person in the room will hate.
All good poems are victories over something.
In his writings, Patton was shameless about his ambition to woo Lena to be his bride. He detailed the gradual progress he made, playing music for her on his violin, writing her poems, beguiling her with stories, engaging her in conversation. It was clear that he obsessed over her. He knew what he wanted and never relented until she was his.
Early poems are a thing it takes years to live down.
My first collection of poems was published by Bloodaxe Books, which was then a very new imprint.
I like it when poems are challenging, when they concern matters important and personal to the author.
There is a time for reciting poems and a time for fists.
Bryan [Iguchi] had this beautiful philosophy about our connection with these incredible cycles. There's a line from one of his poems that always stays with me about 'This process we follow; this cycle we ride' and it's almost become a strap line for the film.
Fine natures are like fine poems; a glance at the first two lines suffices for a guess into the beauty that waits you if you read on.
Many of the poems weave autobiographical elements with fabular or mythic materials.
A successful poem says what a poet wants to say, and more, with particular finality. The remarks he makes about his poems are incidental when the poem is good, or embarrassing or absurd when it is bad and he is not permitted to say how the good poem is good, and may never know how the bad poem is bad. It is better to write about other people's poetry.
In your beauty, how to make poems.
I write poems, have always written them, to transcend the painfully personal and reach the universal.
The passages in which Milton has alluded to his own circumstances are perhaps read more frequently, and with more interest, than any other lines in his poems.
Alienation between the content and form happens frequently in my poems because I obstinately carry on dismantling my body, an act you can also call "dismantling delusion. " I think that after I dismantle my female body, I can finally dismantle established lyric poems.
My favorite poets may not be your bread and butter. I have more favorite poems than favorite poets.