That's what poems are for, unlivable love.
Eight years ago, I was drawn into Keats's world by Andrew Motion's biography. Soon I was reading back and forth between Keats's letters and his poems. The letters were fresh, intimate and irreverent, as though he were present and speaking. The Keats spell went very deep for me.
Early poems are a thing it takes years to live down.
My novels and poems are meant to be read aloud. That's why jazz musicians have been able to adapt my stuff.
I also like poems that are haunted by a structure or a narrative, or poems that frisk flirtatiously at the boundary of sense.
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.
What we feel is beyond words. We should be ashamed of our poems.
Also, I designed a pretty fascinating bracelet, where you put a rubber band around your favorite book of poems for a year, and then you take it off and wear it.
I like to work with multiple sections because they lend themselves to the structure of the poem: its intensifications and arcs and closures. I feel like working with smaller units feels more natural to the way I write poems.
I don't create poetry, I create myself, for me my poems are a way to me.
It is in books, poems, paintings which often give us the confidence to take seriously feelings in ourselves that we might otherwise never have thought to acknowledge.
I'm always doing poems from a place of not-knowing, a place of ignorance in a way.
I think of my best poems as vessels that I can or hope to fill with everything I have.
The few bad poems which occasionally are created during abstinence are of no great interest.
I thought about one of my favorite Sufi poems, which says that God long ago drew a circle in the sand exactly around the spot where you are standing right now. I was never not coming here. This was never not going to happen.
How do poems grow? They grow out of your life.
The idea of how to read a poem is based on the idea that poetry needs you as a reader. That the experience of poetry, the meaning in poetry is a kind of circuit that takes place between a poet, a poem and a reader and that meaning doesn't exist or in here in poems alone.
It was as important to live poetically as to write poems.
I've always wanted editors that actually edited my poems.
I like poems you can tack all over with a hammer and there are no hollow places.