I see cities as organisms, as living creatures. To me Madrid is a man and Barcelona is a woman. And it's a woman who's extremely vain. One of the great Catalan poets, Joan Maragall, wrote this famous poem in which he called Barcelona the great enchantress, or some kind of sorceress, and in which the city has this dark enticing presence that seduces and lures people. I think Barcelona has a lot of that.
A dark poem is meant to redeem the dark part.
All girls should have a poem written for them even if we have to turn this goddamn world upside down to do it.
Someday, I'm gonna write a poem in a letter; Someday, I'm gonna get that faculty together.
Most of the time I'm not really attracted to writing that's focused on filling and fighting it out within a well-defined container. I like work that gets out in the world and lets the world shape the poem.
One thing that I believe is that every time I write something, I am taking the time to celebrate. Even if I am writing a sad story or an angry poem, I am still giving those stories my time and attention.
A poem is the perfect place to celebrate imperfection and exult in the ways you fall short of being the person you want to be.
Poetry teaches us things that cannot be learned in prose, such as certain kinds of irony or the importance of the unsaid. The most important element of any poem is the part that is left unsaid. So the poetry frames the experience that lies beyond naming.
You say to yourself, Well, this poem isn't going to be any good, but I'll write it anyway.
People who didn't live pre-Internet can't grasp how devoid of ideas life in my hometown was. I stopped in the middle of the SAT to memorize a poem, because I thought, This is a great work of art and I'll never see it again.
A poem is made up of thoughts, each of which filled the whole sky of the poet in its turn.
A poem is but a thought, a mere memory caught at play. From hand onto paper, bleeding thoughts emerge.
The mind is the great poem of winter, the man, Who, to find what will suffice, Destroys romantic tenements Of rose and ice.
A poem in form still has to have voice, gesture, a sense of discovery, a metaphoric connection, as any poetry does.
To write about the monstrous sense of alienation the poet feels in this culture of polarized hatreds is a way of staying sane. With the poem, I reach out to an audience equally at odds with official policy, and I celebrate our mutual humanness in an inhuman world.
If a poem is written well, it was written with the poet's voice and for a voice. Reading a poem silently instead of saying a poem is like the difference between staring at sheet music and actually humming or playing the music on an instrument.
My life has been the poem I would have writ, But I could not both live and utter it.
I think if you put something in a file that says "war poems" or "love poems" that you already restrict the way in which the poem might move.
I need to be able to write a poem after every film and to kind of cleanse myself from the character because for about three months or so, I'm constantly living through the character's eyes.
It does not matter whether one paints a picture, writes a poem, or carves a statue - simplicity is the mark of a master-hand.