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Poem In Quotes

In this quiet place on a quiet street
where no one ever finds us
gently, lovingly, freedom gives back our pain.
--from poem In a Quiet Place on a Quiet Street
- Aberjhani

Each poem in becoming generates the laws by which it is generated: extensions of the laws to other poems never completely take.
- A R Ammons

In the eyes of others a man is a poet if he has written one good poem. In his own he is only a poet at the moment when he is making his last revision to a new poem. The moment before, he was still only a potential poet; the moment after, he is a man who has ceased to write poetry, perhaps forever.
- W H Auden

For the last four years of her life, Mother was in a nursing home called Chateins in St. Louis... [S]ix months before she died I sent a Mother's Day card. There was a horrible, mushy poem in it. I remember feeling vaguely guilty.
- William S Burroughs

It is well sometimes to half understand a poem in the same manner that we half understand the world.
- Gilbert K Chesterton

I go in and slip a note in Jane's locker, which I've gotten in the habit of doing. It's always just a line or two that I found from some poem in the gigantic poetry anthology my sophomore English taught me from. I said I wouldn't be the kind of boyfriend who reads her poetry, and I'm not, but I guess I am the kind of cheesy bastard who slips lines of poetry into her mornings.
- John Green

I keep the drafts of each poem in color-coded folders. I pick up the folders according to how I feel about that color that day.
- Rita Dove

It is still true that it is easier to compose a poem in the form of a manual for adjusting a VCR than it is to write a piece using just tuning as a symphony.
- Brian Ferneyhough

The heart of the matter seems to me to be the direct interaction between one's making a poem in English and a poem in the language that one understands and values. I don't see how you can do it otherwise.
- Robert Fitzgerald

In the manner of one recognizing a line from a familiar poem in a strange book.
- Neil Gaiman

But no one ever explains how it's the little choices that send your life careening in another direction, like deciding to send a poem in the mail or saying yest to a walk on a moonless night.
- Julie Gittus

I deliberately wrote a poem in my last book where I was suggesting that there are other passions as great as or more important than the passion of sex.
- Thom Gunn

Perhaps first and foremost is the challenge of taking what I find as a reader and making it into a poem that, primarily, has to be a plausible poem in English.
- Marilyn Hacker

Before Plato could describe love, the loved one had to be invented. We would never love anybody if we could see past our invention. Bosie is my creation, my poem. In the mirror of invention, love discovered itself.
- Tom Stoppard

I believe everyone has this fuckin' poem in his heart.
- Bill Hicks

One must write poetry in such as way that if one threw the poem in a window, the pane would break.
- Daniil Kharms

In Science we have been reading only the notes to a poem; in Christianity we find the poem itself.
- C S Lewis

Reading a poem in translation is like kissing a woman through a veil.
- Anne Michaels

A poem in form still has to have voice, gesture, a sense of discovery, a metaphoric connection, as any poetry does.
- Robert Morgan

I love to compare different time frames. Poetry can evoke the time of the subject. By a very careful choice of words you can evoke an era, completely throw the poem into a different time scale.
- Robert Morgan

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.
- Andrew Motion

Well, it's a badge of honour for any self-respecting poet to be criticized by Auberon Waugh. 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.
- Andrew Motion

One will never again look at a birch tree, after the Robert Frost poem, in exactly the same way.
- Paul Muldoon

The poem in which the reader does not feel himself or herself a participant is a lecture, listened to from an uncomfortable chair, in a stuffy room, inside a building.
- Mary Oliver

Wanted: a needle swift enough to sew this poem into a blanket.
- Charles Simic

(About her age when her first poem was published...) As a poet, it's fair to say that I was a 'late bloomer.' My youngest had published two poems by the age of nine. Isn't that amazing? I was a little older when I saw my first poem in print -- almost 40 years older. Now my little boy is my editor, and I wouldn't have it any other way. I'm the only writer I know who used to burp her editor.
- Donna J Stone

We took Beowulf, the epic poem in Old English, and put it right together with John Gardner's contemporary retelling. If you bring it into today, we really feel that it has something very fresh to say now.
- Julie Taymor

Poem in other words may or may not result from inspiration but must (in reader and author alike) produce it--
- Franz Wright

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