Writing Poetry Quotes - Page 3

• Suppose that throughout your childhood you were good with numbers. Other kids used to copy your homework. You figured store discounts faster than your parents. People came to you for help with such things. So you took accounting and eventually became a tax auditor for the IRS. What an embarrassing job, right? You feel you should be writing poetry or doing aviation mechanics or whatever. But then you realize that tax collecting can be a calling too.

  James Hillman

  Jobs, Writing, Kids

  Source: scottlondon.com

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• I remember writing a song when I was about 15. This is the one I can remember. I know I'd been writing poetry for a long time, since I was about eight, but I remember my first one that I put to chords. I was really trying to be like the psychedelic era Beatles, I was obsessed. All I could think about was Beatles and Hendrix. So I tried to write a psychedelic song, and it was the worst. I couldn't even... If I read it now - I still have the book somewhere - it makes me cringe out loud. It was just about psychedelic stuff.

  Ladyhawke

  Song, Book, Writing

  "Coup De Main x AllTracks | Ladyhawke". Interview with Rose Riddell, www.coupdemainmagazine.com. March 21, 2016.

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• I think the culture can absorb so many people writing poetry and trying to earn their living in poetry.

  Edward Hirsch

  Writing, Thinking, People

  "Do MFA Programs Hurt Poetry?". Big Think interview, bigthink.com.

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• I think that the dark side of MFA programs is that they're generating more poets than the culture can absorb and there are more people writing poetry than possibly read it or can certainly earn a living around it.

  Edward Hirsch

  Writing, Dark, Thinking

  Source: bigthink.com

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• I was inspired by what students have done in some schools organizing walkouts protesting the lack of funding and that sort of thing. There are opportunities for students to engage in those types of protests - taking to the streets - but there is also writing poetry, writing music, beginning to express themselves, holding forums, educating each other, the whole range.

  Michelle Alexander

  Writing, School, Opportunity

  Source: www.truth-out.org

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• The judges who awarded the 1980 Commonwealth Poetry Prize to my first collection of poems, Crossing the Peninsula and Other Poems, cited with approval and with no apparent conscious irony my early poem, "No Alarms." The poem was composed probably sometime in 1974 or 1975, and it complained about the impossibility of writing poetry - of being a poet - under the conditions in which I was living then.

  Shirley Geok-lin Lim

  Writing, Judging, Alarms

  "Walking with Her Muse: An Interview with Shirley Geok-lin Lim". Contemporary Women's Writing, Volume 8, Issue 2, 1 July 2014, Pages 123 - 135, academic.oup.com. June 22, 2013.

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• The mysterious thing about writing poetry is that when you're - when things are going poorly, when you're not thinking well, even making two sentences together is extremely hard and I just can't make the connections.

  Edward Hirsch

  Writing, Thinking, Mysterious Things

  Big Think interview, bigthink.com.

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• Now, the process of writing poetry is very messy. Not systematic, never quite the same

  Edward Hirsch

  Writing, Systematic, Never Quit

  "Embracing the Mess of Poetry". Big Think interview, bigthink.com.

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• Even though novels were the love of my life, I started off writing poetry. I think because I had a knack for image and lyricism, even though I didn't really have anything to write about, or I didn't know what to write about. I could just couple words together that pleased me and so poetry seemed sort of natural.

  Melissa Febos

  Couple, Writing, Thinking

  Source: therumpus.net

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• I mean, what's thematic? How to put it? Going back to, like, 1980, when I started writing poetry. Language itself became an issue. I'd even think about font as an aspect of text, you know, how something looks on a page. A lot of this is the product of a very solitary existence, it's like, language, I mean, you know. A lot of time spent alone in the creation of all of this stuff.

  Richard Meltzer

  Writing, Mean, Thinking

  Source: therumpus.net

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• I didn't mind writing incoherently, up until about 1980, occasionally. But after that, I decided, might as well be articulate. And I found, though, that writing poetry affected my prose to the point where I never again wrote in one draft, and my prose just took longer and longer and longer. It took longer and longer to come up with an acceptable text. And that's probably one of the reasons that my output has slowed down.

  Richard Meltzer

  Writing, Mind, Might

  Source: therumpus.net

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• My goals as an artist have nothing to do with speaking to an audience. I love to have a good time, but when it comes to poetry I'm not really interested in writing poetry that seeks to entertain or operate safely within the mainstream and, to be clear, I'm not disparaging the really phenomenal work that does - it's just not my interest as a poet.

  Dawn Lundy Martin

  Writing, Artist, Goal

  Source: therumpus.net

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• Nonfiction ties your hands a bit, and just like writing poetry in rhyme, it can force you to make more brutal decisions in terms of word choice, plot, etc.

  Emily Susan Rapp

  Writing, Hands, Ties

  Source: therumpus.net

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• I've always just liked writing poetry, but it's much later that I've discovered that there's this whole poetry world out there, that you almost have to be accepted into, like this little club.

  Victoria Chang

  Writing, World, Clubs

  Source: therumpus.net

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• I've been writing songs since I was like six or seven. I've been writing poetry and short stories and stuff, but my first serious, serious song, I wrote when I was fourteen.

  Gabrielle Aplin

  Song, Writing, Stories

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• I'm an actress, primarily. I love to write poetry. I've been writing poetry since I was 12 years old.

  Masiela Lusha

  Writing, Years, Actresses

  Source: thecelebritycafe.com

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• If you want to change people by talking about God, then there is only one way: instead of teaching God, you must live God. Because: "teaching" God is unthinkable in any other way than the way you would teach love or poetry. You teach love only through love, poetry only through writing poetry, faith in God only through a contagious way of trusting.

  Eugen Drewermann

  Teaching, Writing, Talking

  "Jesus von Nazareth". Book by Eugen Drewermann, 1996.

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• Writing poetry is like always being in love. What masochism! What luxury!

  Jennifer Stone

  Writing, Being In Love, Luxury

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• I have epiphanies all the time, because I'm always thinking. I'm a thinker. I'm always writing poetry, I'm always coming to conclusions.

  Chrisette Michele

  Writing, Thinking, Epiphany

  "Chrisette Michele shocked at No. 1 standing". Interview with Shanon Cook, www.cnn.com. May 20, 2009.

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• One good way to start writing poetry is to read all kinds of poetry: not just in order to imitate but to fill up your head with it, to absorb it, to make poetry an essential part of how you view the world.

  Valerie Worth

  Writing, Views, Order

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• Writing poetry, we live among the wild beasts, and when we touch a man, the stuff of someone in whom we believed, and he goes to pieces like a rotten pie, you... gather together whatever can be salvaged, while I cup my hands around the live coal of life.

  Pablo Neruda

  Writing, Men, Hands

  Milton Rogovin, Pablo Neruda, Dennis Maloney, Robert Bly (1984). “Windows that open inward: images of Chile”, White Pine Pr

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• Through my former experiences, writing poetry and learning other languages leading up to English I find ways to stitch words together that may seem a bit odd, but somehow, sometimes they do work.

  Masiela Lusha

  Writing, Together, Stitches

  Source: thecelebritycafe.com

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• There's very little of the intentional about the business of writing poetry, as least as far as I can see.

  Paul Muldoon

  Writing, Littles, I Can

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• I didn't come in and say: "I'm a singer." I came into the band as a second guitar player and a vocalist, but not the songwriter. I had been writing poetry for years, so I sort of had the nature of the words. I felt like no one else could sing my lyrics, so I took a crack at it.

  Paul Banks

  Writing, Player, Guitar

  "Cap the Old Times: The Story of Interpol's Turn on the Bright Lights". Interview with Ian Cohen, pitchfork.com. November 29, 2012.

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• When writing poetry, it is not that produces a bright idea, but the bright idea that kindles the fire of.

  Cesare Pavese

  Writing, Fire, Ideas

  Cesare Pavese, Alma Elizabeth Murch (1961). “This Business of Living”, p.90, Transaction Publishers

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