Many poets write books. They'll tell you: Well, I've got my next book, but there are two poems I need to write, one about x, one about y. This is a wonder to me.
How do poems grow? They grow out of your life.
I do not know how to make poems
My readers at that time were still men of letters; but there had to be other people waiting to read my poems.
To write? Because all this is going to vanish. The only thing left will be the prose and poems, the books, what is written down. Man was very fortunate to have invented the book. Without it the past would completely vanish, and we would be left with nothing, we would be naked on earth.
My dream right now is - and I don't know how to do it, and I don't know if it will work exactly - but just this sort of vague aspiration to start some kind of website where people send in their stories or poems, and me or perhaps some other people turn that into music. And then by the end of the year we make a record and actually put it out. Like a band, but the band is actually a combination of the musician and the fan. I think that's a very 21st-century way of doing it.
And me happiest when I compose poems: Love, power, the huzza of battle are something, are much: yet a poem includes them like a pool water and reflection.
To my mind, most prose poems are more prose than poetry. They don't possess most of the qualities of a poem.
I tell my students to think of poems as language plus, language with value added beyond its everyday use.
I thought poems were songs for people with bad voices.
The critics could never mortify me out of heart - because I love poetry for its own sake, - and, tho' with no stoicism and some ambition, care more for my poems than for my poetic reputation.
We have always made mistakes, but the greatest mistakes are the poems we have written.
A writer who has never explored words, who has never searched, seeded, sieved, sifted through his knowledge and memory. . . dictiona ries, thesaurus, poems, favorite paragraphs, to find the right word, is like someone owning a gold mine who has never mined it.
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.
If a writer writes poems and short stories and novels, but nobody ever reads them, is she really a writer?
My poems mean what people take them to mean.
Some poems are art because of their passion.
I let my narrative embroidering impulses take over in prose poems.
Those of us who make up poems have agreed not to say what the pain is.
I don't think I'd ever get any better as a poet if I didn't push myself, very deliberately, to grow. My best poems surprise me, as they should, but I fight them at every turn, possibly just because I'm stubborn.