I like Beethoven, especially the poems.
Rock and roll kind of screwed up my voice poetically. I found myself having this 'Beat' voice in my poems. It was like this self-fulfilled prophecy because everybody was calling me this rock poet, this Beat poet.
I've already written 300 space poems. But I look upon my ultimate form as being a poetic prose. When you read it, it appears to be prose, but within the prose you have embedded the techniques of poetry.
I was very committed to the process of composing, working at poems, putting things together and taking them apart like some kind of experimental filmmaker.
My favorite subject was English or creative writing. We did poems and making a magazine, and I did one on celebrities. I called it 'Celebrity Life Magazine.' I interviewed my good friend Kaley Cuoco.
I play with language a great deal in my poems, and I enjoy that. I try to condense language, that is, I try to express complicated but I hope real emotions as simply as possible. But that doesn't mean the poems are simple, just that they are as truthful as I can make them.
When I first discovered for myself the Celtic Twilight and read the earlier poems of Yeats and others, all was entirely incomprehensible to me. I groped through a mist of blurred meanings, stumbled through lines in which every accent seemed to be in the wrong place.
All I wanted to do was write - at the time, poems, and prose, too. I guess my ambition was simply to make money however I could to keep myself going in some modest way, and I didn't need much, I was unmarried at the time, no children.
I liked the kid who wrote me that he had to do a term paper on a modern poet and he was doing me because, though they say you have to read poems twice, he found he could handle mine in one try.
I learned to play guitar at a young age and converted poems and stuff that I had written to songs.
Don't be too harsh to these poems until they're typed. I always think typescript lends some sort of certainty: at least, if the things are bad then, they appear to be bad with conviction.
I tend to like poems that engage me - that is to say, which do not bore me.
Poetry from the bottom up is an act of selection: you kind of feel your way through the crowds of poems. The good ones came forward a long time ago, and the bad ones fell away.
Since the age of 11, I have loved writing poems and fragments from my life.
No, I don't know any Emily Dickinson poems!
The animal encounter poem is now so distinct a genre that it would be possible to create a full-length anthology from deer encounter poems alone, and many varieties of experience would emerge from such an exercise.
I write... sonnets... and writing sonnets is boring. You have to find rhymes; you have to write hendecasyllables; so after a while, I get bored and my drawer is overflowing with unfinished short poems.
The only difference between me and others is that they think they can change something with cute little poems, nice cards or embracing trees and being nice to little lapdogs.
It may be said that poems are in one way like icebergs: only about a third of their bulk appears above the surface of the page.
I got $30 from Nation magazine for a poem and $500 for my first book of poems.
I don't want my poems to be sentimental, though I do acknowledge that sentiment is probably rather under-reported in a lot of people's feelings a lot of the time.
I still read Donne, particularly his love poems.
The reason one writes poems is so that your poem will be remembered.
I'm terrified of switching the computer on because there are so many poems.
I am a genius who has written poems that will survive with the best of Shakespeare, Wordsworth and Keats.
I would come to understand there is no poem separable from its source. I began to see that poems are not just an individual florescence. They are also a vast root system growing down into ideas and understandings. Almost unbidden, they tap into the history and evolution of art and language.
Favorite poems are like favorite children. We definitely have them but we never tell as the others would have their feelings hurt.
I seem to keep returning to my father in poems because his personality was so extreme, so driven. He did everything to excess.
Poems seem to have a life of their own. They tell you when enough is enough.
No poems can please for long or live that are written by water drinkers.
If I weren't musical, then I would have just published a book, you know? But I'm lucky enough to play piano, and so I use piano to convert my poems.
All poems say the same thing, and each poem is unique. Each part reproduces the others, and each part is different.
At high school, instead of the weekly essay, I would write a poem, and the teacher accepted that. The impulse was one of laziness, I'm certain. Poems were shorter than essays.
I don't expect you'll hear me writing any poems to the greater glory of Ronald and Nancy Reagan.
I can't understand these chaps who go round American universities explaining how they write poems: It's like going round explaining how you sleep with your wife.
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.
