Top 100 Quotes About Poem Writing
#1. When I'm assembling a book I concentrate as though I were writing a poem. A truly imagined arrangement will indicate gaps and generate new poems. I re-read the new poems in my folder in the hope that this might happen.
Michael Longley
#2. Instead of noting down things I'm unlikely to forget, I will write a poem. Even if I have never written one before and even if I never do so again, I will at least know that I once had the courage to put my feelings into words.
Paulo Coelho
#3. 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
#4. I am the poet, you are the poem; I hold the pen, you are the words, love is the ink, silence is the blank page.
Jenim Dibie
#5. He who would write heroic poems should make his whole life a heroic poem.
Thomas Carlyle
#6. The writing of an assay-type poem or a poem investigating perspective isn't an exercise of rational or strategic mind. Poems for me are acts of small or large desperation. They grapple with surfaces too steep to walk in any other way, yet which have to be traveled.
Jane Hirshfield
#7. I entered a poem in a poetry contest around 1987, and the poem won and I received $1,000 for it. That made me realize that maybe what I was writing was worth reading to people. After that, for some reason, I turned to novels and I've written mainly novels ever since.
Sharon Creech
#8. Poetic success is when you write a poem that makes you excited and bewildered and aglow.
Matthea Harvey
#9. Everyday begins like a blank chalkboard, on which each one of us can write the poem of our present and our dreams for the future.
Ricky Martin
#10. I started out wanting to write great poems, then wanting to discover true poems. Now, I want to be the poem.
Mark Nepo
#11. As Aristotle said, you have to be an aristocrat or a reactionary to write a good proletarian poem.
Kenneth Rexroth
#12. To write about the monstrous sense of alienation the poet feels in this culture of polarized hatreds is a way of staying sane. With the poem, I reach out to an audience equally at odds with official policy, and I celebrate our mutual humanness in an inhuman world.
Maxine Kumin
#13. How would you start to write a poem? How would you put together a series of words for its first line - how would you know which words to choose? When you read a poem, every word seemed so perfect that it had to have been predestined - well, a good poem.
Ashley Hay
#14. Poetry is sentimental to begin with. To write a sentimental poem is an act of redundancy.
Mary Ruefle
#15. The success of the poem is determined not by how much the poet felt in writing it, but by how much the reader feels in reading it.
John Ciardi
#16. He reads every book in his home but it is not enough. The country boy craves stories. He devours every poem and fable in his school and library. Still he hungers. For stories.
Jennifer Lanthier
#17. Every word I write is a seed that I may nurture into a small, beautiful poem or a tall, soaring tree.
Rob Bignell, Editor
#18. The reading of a poem should be an experience. Its writing must be all the more so.
Wallace Stevens
#19. One day you will take me completely out of myself, I'll do what the angels cannot do. Your eyelash will write on my cheek the poem that hasn't been thought of.
Rumi
#20. Love may be nothing more than a complex interaction of hormones, conditioned behavior, and positive reinforcement, but try writing a poem or song about that.
Rick Yancey
#21. Writing can sometimes be exploitative. I like to take a few steps of remove in order to respect the privacy of the subject. If readers make the link, they have engaged with the poem.
John Barton
#22. No one begs you to be a poet or write a 1000-page poem. You have to be fueled by a drive, a conviction - a need, a necessity, a vision that is so pressing that it has no other outlet but through you. That doesn't mean that you are unconscious or in trance, but there can be moments like that.
Anne Waldman
#23. This quality becomes important at a time when almost everyone is a poet. And as I said, we live in an age where almost everybody is a poet, but scarcely anyone can write a poem.
Clive James
#24. The writing of a novel or short story or poem or whatever should elevate the audience, not drag the writer down to some level beneath herself. And she - the author - should fight always to prevent that dragging down, especially when the only possible benefit of allowing it to happen is monetary.
Caitlin R. Kiernan
#25. If your workshop praises a poem, don't think everyone is too nice to tell you how terrible it really is. (If it is that kind of workshop, you should get out of it as soon as possible - honest feedback is the sign that people respect your writing and take it seriously.)
Kim Addonizio
#26. Translation makes me look at how a poem is put together in a different way, without the personal investment of the poem I'm writing myself, but equally closely technically.
Marilyn Hacker
#27. He who would not be frustrate of his hope to write well hereafter in laudable things ought himself to be a true poem.
John Milton
#28. I often think of a poem as a door that opens into a room where I want to go.
Minnie Bruce Pratt
#29. For my best poems were all written when I felt the worst. When I was happy, I didn't write anything.
Langston Hughes
#31. I am sorry this became, a poem
I beg you, please do not think as blame
Trust me as you trust god
I am your friend, in pain
This insane writing, which turned into poem
Santosh Kalwar
#32. If you're going to write, write one poem all your life, let nobody read it, and then burn it. This is very young thinking, I confess, but it is the seminal part of my life.
Jack Nicholson
#33. The idea that a poem was a made thing stayed with me, and I decided then that I wanted to be an artist, not just a diarist. So I put myself through a kind of apprenticeship in writing poetry, and I understood even then that my practice as a poet was deeply related to my reading.
Edward Hirsch
#34. One poem or story doesn't matter one way or the other. It's the process of writing and life that matters.
Natalie Goldberg
#35. When I'm writing the poem, I feel like I have to close my eyes. I don't mean literally, but you invite a kind of blindness, and that's the birth of the poem.
Eileen Myles
#36. Often I'm struck by something that I read; then I go and research it a little more, especially if I begin a poem, and I find out that I need to know more. Then I usually get intrigued and excited about whatever it is I'm writing about.
Pattiann Rogers
#37. Never discuss the poem you contemplate writing. It's like turning on the outside spigot. It takes all the pressure off the upstairs bathroom.
Robert Frost
#38. 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
#39. Writing a poem doubles, triples the experience or connection that initiated it.
Frances Mayes
#40. My own emotional health issues were bullying me during the time I was drafting that poem. It was a pressure I couldn't pin down or diagnose. And like many, if not most, writers I had the self-consciousness to recognize it made great conditions for writing.
Gregory Pardlo
#41. Harrison wrote a two-page poem about his deep feelings of loss when his dog Filbert died, and Mrs. Minerva, the creative writing teacher, gave it a B-minus. Do you know what that does to a a person to get a B-minus in Grief?
Joan Bauer
#42. Every poem that I write is, in a sense, trying to find adequate words for this unspeakable word, around which my entire life turns.
Kevin Hart
#43. I've been writing since I was sixteen. At first, I wrote mostly short stories and poetry. The first thing I ever had published was a poem about a football game. It was printed in my local newspaper.
Jerry Spinelli
#44. 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.
William H Gass
#45. I believe in creative failing - to contine to write poems that fail and fail and fail until a day comes when you've got a thousand poems behind you and you're relaxed and you finally write a good poem.
Ray Bradbury
#46. Poems are never finished - just abandoned
Paul Valery
#47. I tend to write poetry that is rich in data of various sorts. The lyric poem isn't perfectly suited to accommodating such data, so I've had to find new ways to say everything that I want to say.
Campbell McGrath
#48. No race can prosper till it learns that there is as much dignity in tilling a field as in writing a poem.
Booker T. Washington
#49. Never write a poem about anything that ought to have a poem written about it.
Richard Hugo
#50. It is easier to write an indifferent poem than to understand a good one.
Michel De Montaigne
#51. We can live quiet, apparently sedate lives if we express our wildness by risking and leaping in our writing...The strangest, most far-out renegade part of ourselves can be expressed in a poem while we sit quietly in our kitchen or bedroom. This can save our lives
Susan Goldsmith Wooldridge
#52. No song or poem will bear my mother's name. Yet so many of the stories that I write, that we all write, are my mother's stories.
Alice Walker
#54. The process of writing a poem represents work done on the self of the poet, in order to make form.
Muriel Rukeyser
#55. After ten standard months I was done, acknowledging the ancient aphorism to the effect that no book or poem is ever finished, merely abandoned.
Dan Simmons
#56. As I read you I fell in love with the holes between your words and I loved you most on the days you could not love yourself.
Jenim Dibie
#57. What I love about drafts is the experimental nature of them. The draft is what you know about writing a poem running up against what you don't know about the subject. If you're lucky, you get to surprise yourself.
Cornelius Eady
#58. Be still my hand and let the words write themselves upon my heart. Be still my heart and let your pages be filled in silence.
Cristen Rodgers
#60. Usually form seems to find me in the process of writing a poem, though I have nothing against starting out with the form.
Matthea Harvey
#61. If I were to choose between the power of writing a poem and the ecstasy of a poem unwritten, I would choose the ecstasy. It is better poetry.
Kahlil Gibran
#62. When you write, don't say, "I'm going to write a poem." That attitude will freeze you right away. Sit down with the least expectation of yourself; say, "I am free to write the worst junk in the world."
Natalie Goldberg
#63. I can't picture myself starting out aiming to do anything or having much of an agenda.I think in writing a poem, I'm making some tonal adjustments, and it took me a long time to allow anything like fun into my poetry.
Billy Collins
#64. Even if you're a poet sitting in your room writing a poem, you're still in the world - although I guess being a poet is a different than having to deal with 40 or 50 people to raise a couple million bucks and all that bullshit.
Abel Ferrara
#65. She reminded me that I could write stories,/
could be struck by lightning & live.
Jen Currin
#67. At the point where I'm trying to force something and it's not happening, and I'm getting frustrated with, say, writing a poem, I can go and pick up the brushes and start painting. At the point where the painting seems to not be going anywhere, I go and pick up the guitar.
Joni Mitchell
#68. In fact, sometimes traveling the world is a way of not writing a poem, but it's the quality of experience. It's being able to experience something and when you begin to write about it be able to apply the tools that you need for writing.
Rita Dove
#70. In a sense, the story, or poem or verse or whatever it is you're writing, you can kind of think of it as a kind of projectile. Imagine it is a kind of projectile which has been specially shaped to be aerodynamic, and that your target is the soft grey putty of the reader's brain.
Alan Moore
#71. I am looking for a poem that says Everything so I don't have to write anymore.
Tukaram
#72. Or that writing a poem you can read to no one
is like dancing in the dark.
Ovid
#73. One of the things I'm constantly telling my students is that they're never going to write a poem everyone gets, or if they do, they've failed. They should leave someone behind every time.
Rigoberto Gonzalez
#74. I have never started a poem yet whose end I knew. Writing a poem is discovering.
Robert Frost
#75. No matter that I have inhibitions enough to fill all my pockets; I keep trying , hoping that one day I'll write a poem I can be proud to let sit in a museum exhibit as the only proof I existed.
Sarah
#76. 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.
Muriel Rukeyser
#78. Even a baby can write a poem. It doesn't guarantee the sale.
Bhavik Sarkhedi
#79. Imagine writing a poem with a sweating, worried-looking boy handing you a different pencil at the end of every word. My golf, you may say, is no poem; nevertheless, I keep wanting it to be one.
John Updike
#80. If you know what you are going to write when you're writing a poem, it's going to be average.
Derek Walcott
#81. For me the initial delight is in the surprise of remembering something I didn't know I knew. I have never started a poem yet whose end I knew. Writing ... is discovering.
Robert Frost
#82. I have written every poem, every novel, for the same purpose-to find out what I think, to know where I stand.
May Sarton
#83. Writing or making anything-a poem, a bird feeder, a chocolate cake-has self-respect in it. You're working. You're trying. You're not lying down on the ground, having given up.
Sharon Olds
#84. When your heart starts to feel full again. I love FREE refills, and if a restaurant tries to double charge me, I refuse to write a love poem on their Yelp page.
-Karen Quan and Jarod Kintz
Karen Quan
#85. I do feel like no matter what you're doing, whether it's music or writing a play or a poem or drawing a picture or painting something, that you're speaking to what is it you want to express, what is it you want to see.
J.J. Abrams
#86. You will have a story in there ... or a character, a place, a poem, a moment in time. When you find it, you will write it. Word after word after word after word.
Patricia MacLachlan
#88. And why should any man who writes, even if he writes things immortal, nurse anger at the world's neglect? Who asked him to publish? Who promised him a hearing? Who has broken faith with him? Your poem, your novel, who bargained with you for it?
George Gissing
#89. I think maybe today a poem I hope
after breakfast I start trying
pulling it out of my own gut
mostly by force
John Thomas Idlet
#90. I find in my own writing that only fiction - and rarely, a poem - fully tests me to the kind of limits of what I know and what I feel.
John Updike
#91. Remember picture books are the closest form of writing to a poem. Even though they don't have to rhyme, they must be poetic. They must be written so the worst actress can read with comfort and expression.
Kirby Larson
#92. Insisting that his writing did not offer a philosophy of life, Hardy claims that each poem was an 'impression', intensely subjective and evanescent.
Geoffrey Harvey
#93. Sometimes the only way I know how to work through something is by writing a poem. And sometimes I get to the end of the poem and look back and go, 'Oh, that's what this is all about,' and sometimes I get to the end of the poem and haven't solved anything, but at least I have a new poem out of it.
Sarah Kay
#94. From the beginning. I was a poem-writing child. I wrote little novels in my composition book when I was eight, nine years old.
Joan Larkin
#95. The tragedy of love is in its ending,
the blessing - everything else.
No love ever deserves to end.
Akif Kichloo
#96. Be encouraged. Your heart is writing a poem on the world and it's being turned into a thousand songs.
Donald Miller
#97. Often when I write poetry I don't quite know what I'm saying myself. I mean, I can't restate the poem. The meaning of the poem is the poem.
Pattiann Rogers
#98. I thought a bit of poetry might be interesting - I even write a few lines myself. I composed a short poem for my mum's 70th birthday recently. When I recited it I saw the glint of a tear in her eye ... although I guess it wasn't the quality of the poetry was that making her cry!
Iain Dowie
#99. I approach writing a poem in a much different state than when I am writing prose. It's almost as if I were working in a different language when I'm writing poetry. The words - what they are and what they can become - the possibilities of the words are vastly expanded for me when I'm writing a poem.
Pattiann Rogers
#100. The knowledge that it takes to write a poem gets burnt up in the writing of the poem.
Li-Young Lee