Writing Poetry Quotes - Page 2

• 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.

  Clive James

  Writing, People, Too Much

  "Clive James on turning his ‘last time on earth’ into a writing wellspring". Interview with Art Beat, www.pbs.org. December 3, 2013.

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• It's hot tonight and half the neighborhood is drunk. the other half is dead. if I have any advice about writing poetry it's - don't. I'm going to send out for some fried chicken.

  Charles Bukowski

  Writing, Drunk, Advice

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• In writing poetry, all of one's attention is focused on some inner voice.

  Li-Young Lee

  Writing, Voice, Attention

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• A banker warned the British poet Robert Graves that one could not grow rich writing poetry. He replied that if there was no money in poetry, there was certainly no poetry in money, and so it was all even.

  Robert Graves

  Writing, Bankers, Rich

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• Everyone needs solitude, especially a person who is used to thinking about what she experiences. Solitude is very important in my work as a mode of inspiration, but isolation is not good in this respect. I am not writing poetry about isolation.

  Wislawa Szymborska

  Inspiration, Writing, Thinking

  "Alone with the Greta Garbo of verse". Interview with James Hopkin, www.theguardian.com. July 15, 2000.

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• The whole process of having to put the thing into the world seems so antithetical to the act of writing. Poetry is slightly easier, because there's less money and fewer people involved. You just let a book of poems trickle out in the world, and it finds its own people. Novels are much harder, and you don't think you should have to do some of the things you're made to do.

  Nick Laird

  Book, Writing, Thinking

  Source: www.interviewmagazine.com

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• This is going to sound nuts but it took me forever to figure out why I'd stopped writing poetry - I mean, I went about a decade where I wrote very little poetry and I thought it was because I was doing a weekly blog. And then when we moved, I reconfigured my writing desk. The previous one had had very little space to write by hand. And suddenly, the poetry was gushing!

  Achy Obejas

  Writing, Mean, Forever

  Source: therumpus.net

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• I always loved singing and writing poetry. I always loved music, and I’ve loved writing my whole life. When I put them together it was probably in my early 20s, where I put words to music for the first time.

  Lisa Marie Presley

  Writing, Singing, Together

  "Lisa Marie Presley: ‘Don’t Cry, Daddy’". Interview with Pat Gallagher, www.huffingtonpost.com. September 9, 2013.

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• When I devoted myself to poetry - and poetry is a very serious medium - I don't think the people that knew me as an individual with that tongue-in-cheek kind of humor...well, it didn't always lend itself to my poetry. When you're writing poetry, it's like working with gold, you can't waste anything. You have to be very economical with each word you're going to select. But when you're writing fiction, you can just go on and on; you can be more playful. My editor's main task is to cut back, not ask for more.

  Ana Castillo

  Writing, Cutting, Thinking

  Source: www.english.illinois.edu

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• I wrote poetry in middle school and high school and even through college. It was bad. I just don't think I'm very good at writing poetry. I mean, the distillation, I think, is hard for me, but I love poetry.

  Jesmyn Ward

  Writing, School, Mean

  Source: therumpus.net

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• When I came into consciousness as a writer when I was in my early 20s, I just assumed that a writer did - a poet writer did everything all at once. I would write poetry, and while writing poetry I would also write work in the world - if I could get into the world.

  W. S. Di Piero

  Writing, World, Consciousness

  Source: www.pbs.org

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• I began writing poetry when I was about 10. Bad poetry, but you start with bad poetry.

  Jonas Mekas

  Writing

  Source: www.interviewmagazine.com

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• Just getting something to work usually means writing reams of code fast, like a Stephen King novel, but making it maintainable and high-quality code that really expresses the ideas well, is like writing poetry. Art is taking away.

  Erik Naggum

  Art, Kings, Writing

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• with a country of rare picturesqueness for a background, a people of rare beauty for actors, everybody more or less permeated with the artistic instinct and everybody more or less writing poetry - California has a pageant for breakfast, a fiesta for luncheon and a carnival for dinner. They are always electing queens. In fact any girl in California who hasn't been a queen of something before she's twenty-one is a poor prune.

  Inez Haynes Irwin

  Girl, Country, Queens

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• Baudelaire's L'Héautontimorouménos was long seen to be a sexual sadomasochistic poem, it is now generally accepted that the poem is about writing poetry.

  Stephen Dobyns

  Writing, Long, Poetry

  Stephen Dobyns (2011). “Next Word, Better Word: The Craft of Writing Poetry”, p.198, Macmillan

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• The aim of art is almost divine: to bring to life again if it is writing history, to create if it is writing poetry.

  Victor Hugo

  Art, Writing, Divine

  Victor Hugo (1909). “The Works of Victor Hugo ...”

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• one reason why I like writing poetry - you can say so many things in it that are true in poetry but wouldn't be true in prose.

  Lucy Maud Montgomery

  Writing, Reason Why, Being True

  Lucy Maud Montgomery (2016). “L. M. MONTGOMERY – Premium Collection: Novels, Short Stories, Poetry & Autobiography (Including Anne Shirley Novels, Chronicles of Avonlea & The Story Girl Series): Anne of Green Gables, Anne of Avonlea, Anne of the Island, Anne's House of Dreams, Rainbow Valley, The Golden Road, Kilmeny of the Orchard, The Watchman, Songs of the Sea & many more”, p.962, e-artnow

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• I don't know if you actually get something out of writing poetry. I think poetry is an autonomous muse that decides to come and sit on your couch.

  Alice Walker

  Writing, Thinking, Muse

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• I've been writing fiction as long as I've been writing poetry. It's just that the poetry took off, and it took me a lot longer to figure out how to write a story.

  Barbara Hamby

  Writing, Long

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• For a long time, I saw writing prose as chewing rocks compared to the velocities of writing poetry.

  David Biespiel

  Writing, Long, Prose

  Source: therumpus.net

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• 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

  Writing, Different, Language

  "A Conversation with Pattiann Rogers". Interview with Carolyn Perry, Wayne Zade, poems.com. 2009.

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• I began writing and became attached to writing at an early age. I began by writing poetry and experimenting with dialogues: modest plays, in other words. I also used to describe at great length the way people in the area lived.

  Hassan Blasim

  Writing, Play, People

  Source: www.guernicamag.com

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• When I am writing poetry, I try to make my mind go a little lazy, to not think too much, as a way of opening up the part of the brain that makes poems. If I'm successful in this part of the process I'm often not. If my mind gets too lazy it will linger in familiar boring territory, it's like my mind can stroke the physical world.

  Dawn Lundy Martin

  Writing, Successful, Thinking

  Source: therumpus.net

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• I wanted to spend all my time writing poetry. But when I had children I couldn't do that anymore.

  Robert Bly

  Children, Writing, Wanted

  Source: www.utne.com

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• The laureateship [of U.S. Children's Poet] has brought me a couple of appealing contracts, including my first anthology, the 200-poem The National Geographic Book of Animal Poetry.Apart from the increased travel, I won't let anything interfere with writing poetry.

  J. Patrick Lewis

  Children, Couple, Book

  Source: poetryforchildren.blogspot.com

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