When I have worries, fears or a love affair, I have the luck of being able to transform it into a poem.
I usually write for the individual reader -though I would like to have many such readers. There are some poets who write for people assembled in big rooms, so they can live through something collectively. I prefer my reader to take my poem and have a one-on-one relationship with it.
With a poem you can say 'I got my feeling into words for myself. I now have the equivalent in words for that much of what I have felt. '
How much I can learn from a tree! The tree is my church, the tree is my temple, the tree is my mantra, the tree is my poem and my prayer.
It is what man does not know of God Composes the visible poem of the world.
My first advice would be to read, read, read, which sounds interesting coming in a digital age, but it's so much easier to listen to a poem than it is to sit down and actually read it and to hear it in your head and that is something that every poet or aspiring poet needs to be able to do, I think to hear it in their head.
One must write poetry in such as way that if one threw the poem in a window, the pane would break.
The poem is itself a mirror.
I read a poem every night, as others read a prayer.
Every poem can be considered in two ways--as what the poet has to say, and as a thing which he makes.
I prefer formal techniques, and use sonnets and rhyme, any manner of scheme to give a shape and order-of feeling as well as argument-to a poem. But all my life, I've also been a person who's made his bed in the morning and picks up the bath mat. That's what I mean by temperament. Whether genetic or acquired, I have a disposition to arrangements. One is born with this, as if with blue eyes or a weak heart. Do you think Allen Ginsberg ever put the cap back on his toothpaste?
September 11, 2001: Citizens of the U. S. , besieged by terror’s sting, rose up, weeping glory, as if on eagles’ wings. --from the poem Angel of Remembrance: Candles for September 11, 2001
The adventitious beauty of poetry may be felt in the greater delight with a verse given in a happy quotation than in the poem.
Writing a poem is discovering.
Nothing is done. Everything in the world remains to be done or done over. The greatest picture is not yet painted, the greatest play isn't written, the greatest poem is unsung. There isn't in all the world a perfect railroad, nor a good government, nor a sound law. Physics, mathematics, and especially the most advanced and exact of the sciences are being fundamentally revised. . . Psychology, economics, and sociology are awaiting a Darwin, whose work in turn is awaiting an Einstein.
The poem, the song, the picture, is only water drawn from the well of the people, and it should be given back to them in a cup of beauty so that they may drink - and in drinking understand themselves.
The poem is sad because it wants to be yours, and cannot be.
Every beautiful poem is an act of resistance.
A poem is no place for an idea.
What is the poem, after it is written? That is the question. Not where it came from or why.