Poetry Writing Quotes
Remember, writing poetry is like making love: one will never know whether one's own pleasure is shared.
The writing of a poem is like a child throwing stones into a mineshaft. You compose first, then you listen for the reverberation.
A poet is a man who manages, in a lifetime of standing out in thunderstorms, to be struck by lightning five or six times.
Maybe you're one of those people who writes poems, but rarely reads them. Let me put this as delicately as I can: If you don't read, your writing is going to suck.
If there is poetry in my book about the sea, it is not because I deliberately put it there, but because no one could write truthfully about the sea and leave out the poetry.
Poetry is just the evidence of life. If your life is burning well, poetry is just the ash.
One should write only those books from whose absence one suffers. In short: the ones you want on your own desk.
One writes because one has been touched by the yearning for and the despair of ever touching the Other.
It’s not the word made flesh we want in writing, in poetry and fiction, but the flesh made word
For me, the short story is not a character sketch, a mouse trap, an epiphany, a slice of suburban life. It is the flowering of a symbol center. It is a poem grafted onto sturdier stock.
. . . All artists’ work is autobiographical. Any writer’s work is a map of their psyche. You can really see what their concerns are, what their obsessions are, and what interests them.
When you're a student of poetry, you're lucky if you don't realize how untalented you are until you get a little better. Otherwise, you would just stop.
I'd always loved poetry and I'd always loved writing music and composing music, but I hadn't thought of putting the two together until around that time.
There is something about writing poetry that brings a man close to the cliff's edge.
I myself have never called what I write anti-poetry. I also think that my poetry should not be only known as the poetry of Ernesto Cardenal but rather as Nicaraguan poetry.
He lives the poetry that he cannot write. The others write the poetry that they dare not realize
poems are small moments of enlightenment
A writer is not so much someone who has something to say as he is someone who has found a process that will bring about new things he would not have thought of if he had not started to say them.
If you only write when inspired, you may be a fairly decent poet, but you'll never be a novelist.
I began to write poetry when I was about four years old. In other words, I've always been writing poetry.
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.
Why do you always write poetry? Why do you not write prose? Prose is so much more difficult.
When I'm writing poetry, 99.9% of my writing begins in English. I spent most of my life in English, although I am bilingual.
No one wants to read poetry. You have to make it impossible for them to put the poem down--impossible for them to stop reading it, word after word. You have to keep them from closing the book.
I have to reach "the poetry condition" to write. Then it is as if the border around me is thinned or blurred or erased or disappeared or dead.
I enjoy poetry where I can talk as bizarre as I please, but theology or philosophy, I always respect the truth by taking it a step further.
Once a year I try writing a poem, usually because I've read some poetry that amazed me and I want to do that.
I don't do much of anything consciously in writing - in poetry writing, anyway, prose usually being a different matter, of course.
I don't write poetry and then strum some chords and then fit the words on top of the chords.
