The only problem with Haiku is that you just get started and then
I don't write poetry for the New Yorker. My poems appear in the Nation, mostly.
You can be a thorough-going Neo-Darwinian without imagination, metaphysics, poetry, conscience, or decency. For 'Natural Selection' has no moral significance: it deals with that part of evolution which has no purpose, no intelligence, and might more appropriately be called accidental selection, or better still, Unnatural Selection, since nothing is more unnatural than an accident. If it could be proved that the whole universe had been produced by such Selection, only fools and rascals could bear to live.
I am a reflection of my mother’s secret poetry as well as of her hidden angers
I write all the time - I write poetry, I love to write
Whereas story is processed in the mind in a straightforward manner, poetry bypasses rational thought and goes straight to the limbic system and lights it up like a brushfire. It's the crack cocaine of the literary world.
I love poetry, read it a lot, but make no claim to being able to write it.
I like the one about the little soulworms that fly out of the nest for the resurrection.
People should be stopped from writing poetry. There's far too much of it. And if they're any good, they'll go ahead anyways.
But in the finished art of the song the use of words has no connection with the use of words in poetry.
From what the moderns want, we must learn what poetry should become; from what the ancients did, what poetry must be.
The central idea of poetry is the idea of guessing right, like a child.
Poetry should be great and unobtrusive, a thing which enters into one's soul, and does not startle it or amaze it with itself, but with its subject.
Most poetry in the modern age has retreated to the private sphere, turning its back on the political realm.
Poetry, with all its obscurity, has a more general as well as a more powerful dominion over the passions than the art of painting.
The immediate success of the war poem anthologies. . . proved that the war had aroused in a new public an ear for contemporary verse. . . There has never before, in the world's history, been an epoch which has tolerated and even welcomed such a flood of verse as has been poured forth over Great Britain during the last three years.
The reverie we intend to study is poetic reverie. This is a reverie which poetry puts on the right track, the track an expanding consciousness follows. This reverie is written, or, at least, promises to be written. It is already facing the great universe of the blank page. Then images begin to compose and fall into place.
The poets are almost always wrong about the facts. That's because they're not interested in the facts, only the truth.
I work on words, mostly, toward them being poetry or short stories, and then some of those become songs.
I guess I've done a lot of different kinds of performing at various times - opera singing, poetry reading, not least high school teaching - and I do enjoy it, at least sometimes. But I find it incredibly anxiety-producing and exhausting. Privacy is more congenial, and I go a little crazy if I can't spend a big chunk of every day, or almost every day, alone. Certainly I have to be alone to write.