Those of us who make up poems have agreed not to say what the pain is.
I carry my unwritten poems in cipher on my face!
I'd rather call prose poems something else, for clarity - something like "poetic prose," prose that contains a quality of poetry, but not poems.
Decide for yourself what kind of works you want to create. . . facts, essays, poems - do you want to speak or to sing?
Spring has again returned. The Earth is like a child that knows many poems. Many, O so many. For the hardship of such long learning she receives the prize. Strict was her teacher. The white in the old man's beard pleases us. Now, what to call green, to call blue, we dare to ask: She knows, She knows!
I was writing poems when I was young, you know, because my father was a poet, so it was absolutely normal to follow my father.
Once outside the magic circle the writers became their lonely selves, pondering on poems, observing their fellow men ruthlessly, putting people they knew into novels; no wonder they were without friends.
Each man has his own batch of poems.
I didn't write poems for a number of years after graduate school because the criticisms of other students in the workshops wouldn't quiet down in my mind when I tried to work.
There are no honest poems about dead women.
It is not enough for poems to be fine; they must charm, and draw the mind of the listener at will.
Years ago I used to set my alarm for 4 am, so that I could wake up in the middle of a dream and move directly into writing. I guess my favorite poems contain a mixture of intuitive and analytical thought.
You needn't tell a bird it's a bird. Or remind a fish of its purpose. It's only us who lose our way. We have names because we must. - from Golden Tongue: The Poems of Steven Slaughter
Everyone thinks they're going to write one book of poems or one novel.
A collected poems' is either a gravestone or a testimonial to survival.
I've always wanted to write poems and nothing else.
I like Beethoven, especially the poems.
I've been working on a collection of prose vignettes about girls I've had crushes on, from the age of six to the age of eighteen. This manuscript is thematic and organized in a way my poems about my friends aren't. My friends get into the poems simply because they mean a lot to me.
I want to write songs with complete sentences. I almos have this obsession with short-changing words. I would never be so pretentious to say that my lyrics are poetry. . . . Poems are poems. Song lyrics are for songs.
I don't write poetry for the New Yorker. My poems appear in the Nation, mostly.