Poetry Quotes - Page 6

I don't think all writers are sad, she said.
I think it's the other way around -
all sad people write.

I rhyme… to see myself, to set the darkness echoing.

One writes because one has been touched by the yearning for and the despair of ever touching the Other.

My Muse sits forlorn
She wishes she had not been born
She sits in the cold
No word she says is ever told.

Give a poet a pen

All a poet can do today is warn.

I have no doubt at all the Devil grins,
As seas of ink I spatter.
Ye gods, forgive my "literary" sins -
The other kind don't matter.

When one does something, one must do it wholly and well. Those bastard existences where you sell suet all day and write poetry at night are made for mediocre minds – like those horses that are equally good for saddle and carriage, the worst kind, that can neither jump a ditch nor pull a plow.

A word only writes
Its night and rides
Its dream.

I write in order to comprehend, not to express myself.

One can not understand language because language cannot understand itself; does not want to understand

I do not write poetry; I take words and dip them in feelings.

Most people are much better at saying things in letters than in conversation, and some people can write artistic, inventive letters, but when they try a poem or story or novel they become pretentious.

Base words are uttered only by the base
And can for such at once be understood;
But noble platitudes - ah, there's a case
Where the most careful scrutiny is needed
To tell a voice that's genuinely good
From one that's base but merely has succeeded.

A writer is not so much someone who has something to say as he is someone who has found a process that will bring about new things he would not have thought of if he had not started to say them.

It’s not the word made flesh we want in writing, in poetry and fiction, but the flesh made word

The crazy thing about poetry is how its simplicity makes it complicated.

I'll be writing as long as I can hold a pen in my curled, crimped arthritic hands and then I'll dictate it, if it comes to that. They'll have to pry my pen out of my cold, dead fingers - and even then, I'll fight 'em for it. Guaranteed.

Those moments before a poem comes, when the heightened awareness comes over you, and you realize a poem is buried there somewhere, you prepare yourself. I run around, you know, kind of skipping around the house, marvelous elation. It’s as though I could fly.

...imagine what you are writing about. See it and live it. Do not think it up laboriously, as if you were working out mental arithmetic. Just look at it, touch it, smell it, listen to it, turn yourself into it. When you do this, the words look after themselves, like magic.