Poem Because Quotes

#1. Sunday is a likely day to write a poem. Because poetry is a piece of language flying around: you'll find notebooks, something on your phone. It's about finding them and getting them off that crumpled piece of paper and onto my computer.

Eileen Myles

#2. In the forest, I thought I'd made the wrong choice. I thought she had the Tennyson poem because it was a Rising poem, and I'd missed my chance to be in the rebellion with her.

Ally Condie

#3. I try not to observe myself in the process of composing a poem because I don't want to come up with a formula, which I would then be unscrupulous in using.

Thom Gunn

#4. You can tell it's a poem because it's swimming in a little gel pack of white space. That shows it's a poem.

Nicholson Baker

#5. No, I think that a person writes a poem because they have an inner urge of something that they want to express, and I think it's that inner urge that you want to express when you write a piece of music.

Leo Ornstein

#6. A thing may fail as a poem because it tries to do what a poem cannot do: it tries to become a treatise on cosmic truth ... We can best be exact about the cosmic things - God and truth, beauty, eternity and love - by not talking directly about them.

Miller Williams

#7. For me, prose is never a poem. Because with prose there are so very few tools to create the music. And one of the most important tools missing is the ability to create silences, as you can in poetry by how you fashion the lines and breaks within the lines and stanzas.

Pattiann Rogers

#8. You told me I wrote that poem because I was afraid of dealing with myself. And I used my mom as an excuse, accusing her of not appreciating or accepting me, when I should have been saying those words into a mirror.

Jay Asher

#9. I feel most at home when I am writing a poem - because in that instant, I am everywhere.

Nathalie Handal

#10. I will be me,
when world aberrantly
will feel, my gravity!
I will turn into my,
when their shrill cry
will stop asking why!
(Poem:Because you so wanna meet me, Book: Ginger and Honey)

Jasleen Kaur Gumber

#11. I do love the prose poem because it's such a perverse and provocative little box - always asking to be questioned, never giving a straight or definitive answer.

Matthea Harvey

#12. Chesterton never achieves a great poem because his poems are compilations of statements not intensely felt but only intensely meant.

Hugh Kenner

#13. The tougher the form the easier it is for me to handle the poem, because the form gives permission to be very gut honest about feelings.

Maxine Kumin

#14. I wrote you this poem because i was afraid/ To come out and tell you i want to get laid.

Jake Wizner

#15. The first line is the DNA of the poem; the rest of the poem is constructed out of that first line. A lot of it has to do with tone because tone is the key signature for the poem. The basis of trust for a reader used to be meter and end-rhyme.

Billy Collins

#16. To say a poem is absolute is saying nothing, because an ink blot can be absolute. Yet you put into it what you like. So it becomes totally relative.

Nicholas Mosley

#17. I write slowly, and I write many, many drafts. I probably have to work as hard as anyone, and maybe harder, to finish a poem. I often write a poem over years, because it takes me a long time to figure out what to say and how best to say it.

Philip Schultz

#18. For me,the Bild-Dichtung [image-poem] is the ideal form,because the drawing process is constantly being interrupted or contrasted by the writing. And since I always have something to say when I am writing,the effort has a balancing effect. Drawing and writing are wonderful complements.

Gunter Brus

#19. our foundation is rocky
because we made a home
in each other's skin.
the damage is beginning
to show.

K.Y. Robinson

#20. It is a novel constructed like a poem, where each character is only exceptional because if the hyperbolic manner in which he represents generality.

Victor Hugo

#21. Fred Moten is a poet I really love because he changes who is telling the poem all the time.

Eileen Myles

#22. He is haunted by a demon, a demon against which he feels powerless, because in its first manifestation it has no face, no name, nothing; and the words, the poem he makes, are a kind of exorcism of this demon.

T. S. Eliot

#23. They want to know
who I write these poems for.
Tell them it's for all lovers
because I don't see a difference
between our love
and their love.

Kamand Kojouri

#24. Will I be less dead because I wrote this poem or you more because you read it long years hence.

Maya Angelou

#25. Shall I tell you our secret? We are charming thieves who steal hearts and never fail because we are the friends of the One.
Blessed is the poem that comes through me but not of me because the sound of my own music will drown the song of Love.

Rumi

#26. Often one spends weeks trying to write a poem out of the conscious mind that never comes to anything - these are sort of 'ideal' poems that one feels ought to be written, but don't because (I fancy) they lack the vital spark of self-interest. A 'real' poem is a pleasure to write.

Philip Larkin

#27. A bad short story or novel or poem leaves one comparatively calm because it does not exist, unless it gets a fake prestige throughbeing mistaken for good work. It is essentially negative, it is something that has not come through. But over bad criticism one has a sense of real calamity.

Rebecca West

#28. Dreams like a podcast,
Downloading truth in my ears.
They tell me cool stuff."
"Apollo?" I guess, because I figured nobody else could make a haiku that bad.
He put his finger to his lips. "I'm incognito. Call me Fred."
"A god named Fred?

Rick Riordan

#29. Love leads us to write poetry because love improves our hearing; like prayer, poetry is every bit as much about listening as it is about speaking. To 'get' the poem is to hear the eloquence of the silence that it calls forth through its manifestation of love.

David Patterson

#30. Every poem holds the unspeakable inside it. The unsayable ... The thing that you can't really say because it's too complicated. It's too complex for us. Every poem has that silence deep in the center of it.

Marie Howe

#31. Don't cry my son
Don't cry, because life is a redeemed fight
Life is a fight that will demean the weak person
And will always exalt the strong ones

Goncalves Dias

#32. I once broke up with a boy because he wrote me an awful poem.

Karen Joy Fowler

#33. Tonight, I won't dream, because nobody
has held me and no hands have strayed and even
though I'm drunk with love, my arms are empty.

Melissa Lee-Houghton

#34. The poem is sad because it wants to be yours, and cannot be.

John Ashbery

#35. I know you are reading this poem through your failing sight, the thick lens enlarging these letters beyond all meaning yet you read on because even the alphabet is precious.

Adrienne Rich

#36. You were the poem I never knew how to write because no words could describe the wind you cannot see, but feel.

Shannon L. Alder

#37. I am happy
Because, I
Found someone
To Blame
For mistakes
Thank God &
You mate,
You ended
My suffocation.

Amen

Rajesh Nanoo

#38. How does a poet know when a poem is ended? Because it lies flat, taut; nothing can be added or subtracted. How does a woman know when a marriage is over? Because of the way her life suddenly shears off in just two directions: past and future.

Carol Shields

#39. Fire burns blue and hot.
Its fair light blinds me not.
Smell of smoke is satisfying, tastes nourishing to my tongue.
I think fire ageless, never old, and yet no longer young.
Morning coals are cool: daylight leaves me blind.
I love the fire most because of what it leaves behind.

Penny Reid

#40. 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.

Anna Journey

#41. The simple truth is that being a creative artist takes courage; it's not a job for the faint of heart. It takes courage each and every time you put a book or poem or painting before the public, because it is, in fact, enormously revealing.

Terri Windling

#42. Because a poem is not written while running or while answering the phone. It's written in whatever minutes one has. Sometimes you have half an hour.

Sharon Olds

#43. The monsters were never
under my bed.
Because the monsters
were inside my head.


I fear no monsters,
for no monsters I see.
Because all this time
the monster has been me.

Nikita Gill

#44. I write because I die again and again at the hands of a world that cannot have me or make me fit. I write because each poem is my reincarnation.
I write to remember the self that inherits me every time another self dies. I write because I cannot lie still.

Jennifer Militello

#45. she wanted because art

Nicole Brossard

#46. from the poem Holographic Personality Disgrace:

Some people are such assholes that saying, "Look, again, I'm sorry I cut off my thumb and glued it to your baby's head because I thought you'd like him better as a unicorn" means nothing to them.

Sam Pink

#47. I don't remember the first poem that I wrote because I've been creating poems since I was around 2 or 3. I don't have any memory of that but my mom has written evidence of it. I've always liked playing with words so when I was younger it had a lot more to do with rhyme and sounds.

Sarah Kay

#48. Many people say that I don't know how to draw because I don't draw particular forms. When will they understand that execution, drawing and color (in other words, style) must be in harmony with the poem?

Paul Gauguin

#49. Love Poem Sharing one umbrella We have to hold each other Round the waist to keep together. You ask me why I'm smiling - It's because I'm thinking I want it to rain for ever. Vicki Feaver

Daisy Goodwin

#50. He didn't much like reading novels - he preferred history or philosophy - or poetry, although he could read only a little poetry at a time, because when a poem "spoke to him" it was as if a brilliant, agonizing light had been turned upon some tiny, private cell of his soul.

Claire Messud

#51. Sidney remembered how strikingly original the poem was. For George Herbert, the time we spend on earth is not all too brief and transient but too long: because it detains human beings from a life outside time and with God.

James Runcie

#52. I've only written one decent poem in my life called "Lizard up My Leg": A lizard up my leg gave me a fright Not because he did, but 'cause he might. Okay, not a great poem, but it's honest and also it's short so I can remember it.

Danny Rubin

#53. Give it air & let the scar on your soul reveal itself, because, like the body, it too was made to heal itself.

Curtis Tyrone Jones

#54. I've thought of the last line of some poems for years and tried them out, It wouldn't work because the last line was much too beautiful for the poem.

Howard Nemerov

#55. Deep down,
I lay dormant inside her head,
Deep down,
I lay the rules inside her head,
Deep down,
I lay inside inside her heart,
Deep down,
I know she will never move on
Because deep down, I am always there

Tanzy Sayadi

#56. Tonight I see no spheres, but project myself
and gaze back, an important trick
because the goal is to be on both sides of the poem,
shuttling between the you and I.

Ben Lerner

#57. And how unfair it would be to torture your heart in never feeling again, because of a feeling you haven't even tried to understand yet.

Nikki Rowe

#58. The first spoken word poem I ever wrote was when I was 14 and I wrote it because I was accidentally signed up for a teen poetry slam. Because I loved poetry I said that I'd try it out.

Sarah Kay

#59. Every poem is shadowed by desire, but it is also shadowed by the problem of rendering desire in language. There is a place where similitude seems to break down because experience itself seems beyond compare.

Edward Hirsch

#60. The sky can never be frozen
because its vastness has chosen
all warmth of our lives as we look above
with unbreakable hearts armoured in love

Munia Khan

#61. They shut me up in Prose - / As when a little Girl / They put me in the Closet - / Because they liked me "still" -

Emily Dickinson

#62. The poem is a cry of the unborn heart. Yes, because the poem perfectly embodies the world, there is no world without poem.

E.L. Doctorow

#63. i knew his heart
was yours
but i wanted
to become
an alchemist
to make gold
of the pieces
i received
because
all i ever felt
was the dark side
of his leaded heart.

K.Y. Robinson

#64. Up on the Brooklyn Bridge a man is standing in agony, waiting to jump, or waiting to write a poem, or waiting for the blood to leave his vessels because if he advances another foot the pain of his love will kill him.

Henry Miller

#65. If I were dead, I wouldn't be sad, and I wouldn't be glad, because I wouldn't be.

Marcus Sedgwick

#66. It was soldier's went marching over the rocks,
and still they came in watery flocks,
because it was spring and the birds had to come,
No doubt that soldier's had to be marching,
and that the drums had to be rolling, rolling, rolling

Wallace Stevens

#67. She is dying because she said.
She is dying for the sake of the word.
It is her body, silent
and fingerless, writing this poem.

Margaret Atwood

#68. At the end of all things, why do lovers break up?

Because love is magic. You have to believe, for it to exist.

Timothy Joshua

#69. I feel the most natural thing is for music to come that way because it's sort of like poetry. Though I do think with poets that I like, like Charles Olson or Ezra Pound, they were rewriting constantly, until the poem becomes a diamond.But with music I don't really feel that way.

Stephen Malkmus

#70. Every day, a piece of music, a short story, or a poem dies because its existence is no longer justified in our time. And things that were once considered immortal have become mortal again, no one knows them anymore. Even though they deserve to survive.

Elfriede Jelinek

#71. Like one who, on a lonely road,
Doth walk in fear and dread,
And, having once turned round, walks on,
And turns no more his head;
Because he knows a frightful fiend
Doth close behind him tread. -
Coleridge's Ancient Mariner.

Mary Shelley

#72. You cannot call a poem female just because it is written by a woman. Nevertheless, I think attempts to find femininity in female bodies, life, and thinking, attempts to find a way for women to speak, will improve widely in Korea.

Kim Hyesoon

#73. They don't know I only speak in runaway train stations
and everybody is always a few minutes too late to the platform.
No one has ever gotten the chance to get too close
because it is never romantic to fuck the girl who makes love to her own sadness every single night.

Katelin Wagner

#74. He found himself wanting to write poetry about how her blue eyes were like starlight and her hair like night, because "night" and "starlight" rhymed, but he had a feeling the poem wouldn't turn out that well ...

Cassandra Clare

#75. Poems are the 'daredevil' of writing
because a poem will say what nobody else wants to say.

Ralph Fletcher

#76. If this world is a poem, it is not because we see the meaning of it at first but on the strength of its chance occurrences and paradoxes.

Maurice Merleau Ponty

#77. Just because you've had enough
doesn't mean you wanted too much.

Dean Young

#78. I don't think of poetry as a 'rational' activity but as an aural one. My poems usually begin with words or phrases which appeal more because of their sound than their meaning, and the movement and phrasing of a poem are very important to me.

Margaret Atwood

#79. I was quite happy in Arkhangelsk.Subsequently, I was sent to a village. I liked it in its own way because it sounded to me very much like the tradition of a hired man in any world-class poem. That's what I was, a hired man. I was working for a collective farm.

Joseph Brodsky

#80. The inextinguishable lesbian spark. You've surely heard about it? The one that was first ignited at Lesbos, because Sappho was so sad every time a young woman left the academy that she wrote her a poem. Fancy being sad because someone leaves! Perverted, that's what I call it. Don't you?

Gerd Brantenberg

#81. Most poets are young simply because they have not been caught up. Show me an old poet, and I'll show you, more often than not, either a madman or a master ... it's when you begin to lie to yourself in a poem in order simply to make a poem that you fail. That is why I do not rework poems.

Charles Bukowski

#82. My favourite poem is the one that starts 'Thirty days hath September' because it actually tells you something.

Groucho Marx

#83. My first performance poem was about how sometimes I was teased for being manly, or a tomboy or whatever. It was saying how just because I looked a certain way and displayed myself a certain way didn't mean that I wasn't also a feminine human ... a woman if you will.

Sarah Kay

#84. The "truth" is the poem itself. Just because someone writes a poem about a feeling she has does not mean that the feeling will stay forever. The truth of the emotion of the poem remains, even if the particular truth of the poet changes.

Denise Duhamel

#85. Because
you rubbed
my shoulder
last night
a poem
traveled down
my arm.

Alice Walker

#86. Many years before, she had read, and recognized as true, the words of W. B. Yeats: 'A Pity beyond all telling is hit at the heart of love'. She had smiled over the poem, and stroked the page, because she had known both that she loved Colin, and that compassion formed a huge part of her love.

J.K. Rowling

#87. Our contempt for any particular poem must be perfect, be total, because only a ruthless reading that allows us to measure the gap between the actual and the virtual will enable to to experience, if not a genuine poem - no such thing - a place for the genuine, whatever that might mean.

Ben Lerner

#88. It's not realistic to imagine that any poem will last forever. Our species won't last forever! We try to capture and preserve our impressions of reality because it's all going away: everything we think and remember, everything we've ever felt, everyone we love.

James Arthur

#89. I do not write to you, but of you,/because the paper that we write on/is our perishable skin.

Melissa Lee-Houghton

#90. I think poetry is the only domain where a writer you like can truly be said to influence you, because you read and reread a poem so many times that it simply drills itself into your head.

Michel Houellebecq

#91. Someone told me just recently that poets are eulogists. It's their job, to eulogize. I didn't know that, but it makes sense. Because in almost every poem of mine there is a loss.

Dan Quisenberry

#92. You do not need a boyfriend or a girlfriend to write an emotional poet; because poetry is beyond hooks and holes.

M.F. Moonzajer

#93. I never felt oppressed because of my gender. When I'm writing a poem or drawing, I'm not a female; I'm an artist.

Patti Smith

#94. In the past I have declined to comment on my own work: because, it seems to me, a poem is what it is; because a poem is itself a definition, and to try to redefine it is to be apt to falsify it; and because the author is the person least able to consider his work objectively.

James Schuyler

#95. Certain voices heard
are heard
not because
they
are phonetic...

But,
from one soul
they head,
to another,
in the form of magic.
(Poem: When, When a not, Book: Ginger and Honey)

Jasleen Kaur Gumber

#96. When somebody discusses my work with me and peruses a poem or two, they get to see a piece of who I am. Because when it comes to poetry, I let it all spill forth. Any other way of writing prose would be a disservice to the art of poetry.

Nicholas Trandahl

#97. You should always be trying to write a poem you are unable to write, a poem you lack the technique, the language, the courage to achieve. Otherwise you're merely imitating yourself, going nowhere, because that's always easiest.

John Berryman

#98. And you're a tall drink of water because we're so fucking thirsty

Andrew Faulkner

#99. Ladies, when you write a poem for Feminism because that is what we sometimes do, remember that it's never about them. It's only about you.

Danielle Valenilla

#100. The first time I ever got up on a stage, I did a comedy poem. I don't know how I got there in the first place because I was very, very shy.

Lesley Nicol