I did that Grammys thing - I did a little freeform poem.
My devils and angels, fears and hopes, insights and stupidities, loves and loathings, are what they are. I don't edit them out so much as try to make them interesting - whether I am talking to you, or writing a poem, or joking with my kids, or speaking on television.
The story and the poem are obviously changed by being placed in the novel, so in a sense they're no longer the works that preceded the novel.
A poem may be worked over once it is in being, but may not be worried into being.
In a funny way, poems are suited to modern life. They're short, they're intense. Nobody has time to read a 700-page book. People read magazines, and a poem takes less time than an article.
She's kind of a walking poem, she's this perfect beauty. . . but at the same time very deep, very smart.
Re examine all you have been told in school and in church Or in any book, dismiss what insults your own soul and your very flesh shall be a great poem.
I don't think one can accurately measure the historical effectiveness of a poem; but one does know, of course, that books influence individuals; and individuals, although they are part of large economic and social processes, influence history. Every mass is after all made up of millions of individuals.
A trouble with poetry is the presence of presumptuousness in poetry, the sense you get in a poem that the poet takes for granted an interest on the reader's part in the poet's autobiographical life, in the poet's memories, problems, difficulties and even minor perceptions. I try to presume that no one is interested in me. And I think experience bears that out. No one's interested in the experiences of a stranger - let's put it that way. And then you have difficulty combined with presumptuousness, which is the most dire trouble with poetry.
Fourier is a mathematical poem.
if Saint Bruce doesn't like your poem, he chops your head off.
Our moments of inspiration are not lost though we have no particular poem to show for them; for those experiences have left an indelible impression, and we are ever and anon reminded of them.
The language of the poem is the language of particulars.
I think that the casual reader and the lyric and confession are trickily tied up together. I mean often when I read my students' poems my first impulse is to say, "O, the subject of this pronoun, this 'I,' is whatever kid wrote this poem. " The audience for lyric poems is "confessionalized" to some extent. And I think this audience tends to find long narrative poems, for instance, kind of bewildering.
In a poem the words should be as pleasing to the ear as the meaning is to the mind.
A poem is like a score for the human voice.
I was always cutting words. I even would write my jokes in my notebook. I still do this, almost like a poem.
The poem must resist the intelligence almost successfully.
The voice does go up in a poem. It is an address, even if it is to oneself.
I see a poem as a multi-coloured strip behind peeling plaster, in separate, shining fragments.