If a writer writes poems and short stories and novels, but nobody ever reads them, is she really a writer?
With Head Off & Split, Nikky Finney establishes herself as one of the most eloquent, urgent, fearless and necessary poets writing in America today. What makes this book as important as anything published in the last decade is the irresistible music, the formal dexterity and the imaginative leaps she makes with metaphor and language in these simply stunning poems. This is a very, very important achievement.
I think that the moment we're living in offers the best opportunity we've had in a long time in that a lot of things having to do with identity politics are being talked about in poems. The only problem there is that a lot of the time these are being talked about in confessional modes.
Poems and songs penned as an unstoppable outpouring of the heart take on a life of their own. They transcend the limits of nationality and time as they pass from person to person, from one heart to another.
I don't create poetry, I create myself, for me my poems are a way to me.
I don't think I'd ever get any better as a poet if I didn't push myself, very deliberately, to grow. My best poems surprise me, as they should, but I fight them at every turn, possibly just because I'm stubborn.
When I go to the shore, I take along the poems of Pablo Neruda. I suppose it's because the poems are simultaneously lush and ripe and kind of lazy, yet throbbing with life - like summer itself.
I think I'm a very good reader of poetry, but obviously, like everybody, I have a set of criteria for reading poems, and I'm not shy about presenting them, so if people ask for my critical response to a poem, I tell them what works and why, and what doesn't work and why.
Robert Creely's poems have two main characteristics. 1) They are short; 2) they are not short enough.
I got $30 from Nation magazine for a poem and $500 for my first book of poems.
It was as important to live poetically as to write poems.
Like all art, poems are only hints and guesses that draw our attention to something larger.
I like it when poems are challenging, when they concern matters important and personal to the author.
There were a hundred booksellers in the old round city founded by the eighth-century caliph al-Mansur. The café and wine-drinking culture of Baghdad has been famous for centuries; there was a whole school of Iraqi poets who wrote poems about the wine bars of medieval Baghdad - the khamriyaat, or wine songs, that I quote in the book.
I have also written some poems which have not been collected in a volume.
A collected poems' is either a gravestone or a testimonial to survival.
Everyone should be able to do one card trick, tell two jokes, and recite three poems, in case they are ever trapped in an elevator.
My earliest poems were a way of talking to somebody. I suppose to myself.
The censorious said she slept in a hammock and understood Yeats's poems, but her family denied both stories.
I always hesitate to call myself a children's poet, and I always hesitate to call what I write for children poetry. Though a few of the verses that I've written, yes, I think they are truly poems.