No, I don't know any Emily Dickinson poems!
Early poems are a thing it takes years to live down.
There are poems inside of you that paper can’t handle.
One critic wrote. . . that my poems sounded as though they had been translated from the Hungarian. I don't know why, but somehow that made me feel quite lighthearted.
Poetic justice, poetic justice. . if I told you that a flower bloom in a dark room would you trust it. I mean I write poems in these songs.
It is clear that we do not exactly choose our poems; our poems choose us.
Poems don't have to rhyme. Poems are about beauty and emotion; in other words poems are about feelings.
In his writings, Patton was shameless about his ambition to woo Lena to be his bride. He detailed the gradual progress he made, playing music for her on his violin, writing her poems, beguiling her with stories, engaging her in conversation. It was clear that he obsessed over her. He knew what he wanted and never relented until she was his.
Looking at the poems of John Gray when I saw the tiniest rivulet of text meandering through the very largest meadow of margin, I suggested to Oscar Wilde that he should go a step further than these minor poets; he should publish a book all margin; full of beautiful, unwritten thoughts.
I think of my best poems as vessels that I can or hope to fill with everything I have.
The reason a poet is a poet is to write poems, not to advertise himself as a poet.
The critics could never mortify me out of heart - because I love poetry for its own sake, - and, tho' with no stoicism and some ambition, care more for my poems than for my poetic reputation.
I like Beethoven, especially the poems.
Who you are contributes to your poetry in a number of important ways, but you shouldn't identify with your poems so closely that when they are cut, you're the one that bleeds.
What I'm fighting for now in my work. . . for an expression relevant to all manner of blacks, poems I could take into a tavern, into the street, into the halls of a housing project.
Favorite poems are like favorite children. We definitely have them but we never tell as the others would have their feelings hurt.
. . . to write well it is entirely necessary to read widely and deeply. Good poems are the best teachers.
Like most of my poems, 'Lie' has several sources: I read a very troubling book called The Sixth Extinction. I took note of the way people, including me, enjoy talking knowledgeably about how the world will end. I drove to Tucson and saw the desert flowering on either side of the road. And I glanced at my spam to see what people wanted to sell me these days.
Poems are other people's snapshots in which we see our own lives.
I work on words quite separately to music. They're both ongoing, and I don't ever feel like I'm working in a cycle in that respect, because it's every day anyway, no matter what I'm doing. Then I get to a point when I've collected together enough words that seem like they want to be songs rather than poems, or sometimes not.