No poem, not even Shakespeare or Milton or Chaucer, is ever strong enough to totally exclude every crucial precursor text or poem.
If that voice that you created that is most alive in the poem isn't carried throughout the whole poem, then I destroy where it's not there, and I reconstruct it so that that voice is the dominant voice in the poem.
The box was a universe, a poem, frozen on the boundaries of human experience.
A poem with grandly conceived and executed stanzas, such as one of Keats's odes, should be like an enfilade of rooms in a palace: one proceeds, with eager anticipation, from room to room.
Plagiarism has been around far longer than the Internet. In fact, I had a poem published in 'Seventeen' magazine when I was 15 years old. About a year later I was informed that there was a girl who used that same poem to win a statewide poetry competition in Alabama. It took months for people to put together that this had happened.
If you read quickly to get through a poem to what it means, you have missed the body of the poem.
The most important tribute any human being can pay to a poem or a piece of prose he or she really loves is to learn it by heart. Not by brain, by heart; the expression is vital.
I have never started a poem yet whose end I knew. Writing a poem is discovering.
I think you can have the greatest lyrics in the world and if it doesn't have the best tune in the world it will suck. I mean if the music wasn't important it would just be a poem.
There's a crystallization that goes on in a poem which the young man can bring off, but which the middle-aged man can't.
The long poem cannot be a digressive, expansive, boring exposition. It is really made of very sharp, Imagistic, quintessential poetic elements.
If a poem is each time new, then it is necessarily an act of discovery, a chance taken, a chance that may lead to fulfillment or disaster.
A poem in form still has to have voice, gesture, a sense of discovery, a metaphoric connection, as any poetry does.
A poem begins in delight and ends in wisdom.
A so-called happy marriage corresponds to love as a correct poem to an improvised song.
Strictly speaking, the idea of a scientific poem is probably as nonsensical as that of a poetic science.
The first poem I ever wrote, about loss, when I was 5 years old, expressed the themes of everything I would ever write.
However, if a poem can be reduced to a prose sentence, there can't be much to it.
I write from the various experiences I live. Not every poem comes from my personal experience, though. It could be something that a friend lived, or a person from my community here, or a woman anywhere around the world.
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.
I was reading the dictionary. I thought it was a poem about everything.
The form of my poem rises out of a past that so overwhelms the present with its worth and vision that I'm at a loss to explain my delusion that there exist any real links between that past and a future worthy of it.
Wanted: a needle swift enough to sew this poem into a blanket.
When somebody's in love with you, they think it's amazing you've written them a poem, and when they don't love you anymore, they hate those poems. They wish those poems would go away.
What inspires a poem for me is usually a moment.
But in a lot of ways my poems are very conventional, and it's no big deal for me to write a poem in either free verse or strict form; modern poets can, and do, do both.
I do not usually revise much, though I often cut, particularly the end or toward the end of a poem.
You can say a lot more with a poem than you can with a song, but with a song you can really be more powerful with it. You can express it a lot more powerfully.
A lot of my poems either have historical sequences or other kinds of chronological grids where I'm locating myself in time. I like to feel oriented, and I like to orient the reader at the beginning of a poem.
A revolutionary poem will not tell you who or when to kill, what and when to burn, or even how to theorize. It reminds you... where and when and how you are living and might live, it is a wick of desire.
The commitment to working at poetry is important because a poet is a maker, and a poem is a made thing. We have to honor our feelings by working to transform them into something meaningful and lasting.
What is the poem, after it is written? That is the question. Not where it came from or why.
Just as a new scientific discovery manifests something that was already latent in the order of nature, and at the same time is logically related to the total structure of the existing science, so the new poem manifests something that was already latent in the order of words.
I've never read a political poem that's accomplished anything. Poetry makes things happen, but rarely what the poet wants.
The divine spark leaps from the finger of God to the finger of Adam, whether it takes ultimate shape in a law of physics or a law of the land, a poem or a policy, a sonata or a mechanical computer.
If a poem is not memorable, there's probably something wrong. One of the problems of free verse is that much of the free verse poetry is not memorable.