Writing Poetry Quotes

I was a late bloomer. But anyone who blooms at all, ever, is very lucky. ~ Sharon Olds

My father died and left me his blessing and his business. His blessing brought no money into my pocket, and as to his business, it soon deserted me, for I was busy writing poetry, and could not attend to law, and my clients, though they had great respect for my talents, had no faith in a poetical attorney. ~ Washington Irving

The poet is he who can write some pure mythology today without the aid of posterity. ~ Henry David Thoreau

Writing poetry is like always being in love. What masochism! What luxury! ~ Jennifer Stone

We will read books together inside the blanket and stay warm. And keep writing poetry in our respective journals. Time will fly but we will still remain inside the blanket forever. ~ Avijeet Das

She [Mrs. Badger] was surrounded in the drawing-room by various objects, indicative of her painting a little, playing the piano a little, playing the guitar a little, playing the harp a little, singing a little, working a little, reading a little, writing poetry a little, and botanizing a little. She was a lady of about fifty, I should think, youthfully dressed, and of a very fine complexion. If I add to the little list of her accomplishments that she rouged a little, I do not mean that there was any harm in it. ~ Charles Dickens

Women have always been poor, not for two hundred years merely, but from the beginning of time ... Women, then, have not had a dog's chance of writing poetry. That is why I have laid so much stress on money and a room of one's own. ~ Virginia Woolf

I once tried hawking my own book around the pubs in the hope that, like the Salvation Army, I too could sell to the cerebrally relaxed. It was a disaster. I had beer thrown over me for being a) a nuisance, b) not as good as Wordsworth and c) a nancy for writing poetry in the first place. ~ Peter Finch

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

When the poet is in love, he is incapable of writing poetry on love. He has to write when he remembers that he was in love. ~ Umberto Eco

Learning to program has no more to do with designing interactive software than learning to touch type has to do with writing poetry ~ Ted Nelson

I guess the quality that makes one write poetry keeps one from selling it. ~ Louise Closser Hale

As she reached the stairs, she made a quick detour and stepped outside.
A crescent moon hung in the midnight blue sky along with trillions of twinkling stars. Out here there were no streetlights to wash out the view. She loved being able to see the stars.
Tonight, the mountains were etched deep purple against the night sky. The white snowcapped tips gleamed silver. Nearer, silhouetted pine trees swayed in the breeze as if in a slow dance.
"You are such a romantic," Trask had once told her. "Are you sure you want to open a bar? You should be writing poetry."
She'd laughed. "How do you know I don't? ~ B. J. Daniels

Everybody is writing, writing, writing - worst of all, writing poetry. It'd be better if the whole tribe of the scribblers - every damned one of us - were sent off somewhere with tool chests to do some honest work. ~ Walt Whitman

A treasure more precious than platinum or gold in your heart ~ Imran Shaikh

Poetry is the most intimate of all writing. I want to speak first from me to myself and then from me to you. ~ Ellen Bass

Writing poetry requires frequent visits to the land of the dead. ~ Marty Rubin

When I'm writing poetry, 99.9% of my writing begins in English. I spent most of my life in English, although I am bilingual. ~ Pat Mora

Life makes writing poetry necessary to prove I really was paying attention. ~ Mark Strand

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

I don't want to write poems that are just really clear about how I'm aware of all the traps involved in writing poetry; I don't want to write fiction that's about the irresponsibility of writing fiction and I've thrown out a lot of writing that I think was ultimately tainted by that kind of self-awareness. ~ Ben Lerner

Writing poetry is what I am. I wouldn't know what else to be. ~ Alice Notley

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 poetry is a passion, ignited by thoughts, fueled by ink. A way to travel through another mind, where souvenirs of tears are tucked away inside your soul. Or leave you with smiles for miles, depending on which route you go. ~ Renee Dixon

Those who would like to become writers attend courses on writing poetry and prose and analyze their own work and that of other writers in development. Teachers teach them that talent is not required and that anyone, who wants to be a writer, can do it if they only master the technique of writing and master the formulas of the genre that they choose. With a little brain storming ideas written on cards, as well as designs and plans on the table, one can even write a novel in a month. There is no secret; the whole secret is in the technique, a little research, and the rest is solved by form, according to a formula, in which it is all nicely wrapped up and packaged.
And so, a bestseller is born. ~ Dejan Stojanovic

I started writing poetry when I was six. I had this teacher who didn't believe the poems I'd bring in were mine because they were dark and sad. But I wrote about what I experienced in my childhood. ~ Mariah Carey

Writing poetry is such an intense experience that it helps to start the process in a casual or wayward frame of mind. ~ Edward Hirsch

The man is in his work,read it if you want to know about him. ~ R.M. Engelhardt

I thought to spend my declining years writing poetry and teaching - but that won't pay the Bergdorf's bill. I think I'll move to somewhere life is cheaper. ~ Erica Jong

Real poetry, is to lead a beautiful life. To live poetry is better than to write it. ~ Matsuo Basho

I started writing poetry because language was how I understood the world. It was a paradigm that made everything matter and in forms that were safe to hold what I felt. ~ Grace Cavalieri

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

One of the ways in which I feel close to God is writing poetry. ~ Christian Wiman

Keep your whole being on the thing you are turning into words. The minute you flinch, and take your mind off this thing, and begin to look at the words and worry about them... Then your worry goes into them and they set about killing each other. So you keep going as long as you can, then look back and see what you have written. After a bit of practice and after telling yourself you are going to use any old word that comes into your head so long as it seems right, you will surprise yourself. You will read back through what you have written and you will get a shock. You will have captured a spirit, a creature. ~ Ted Hughes

Poetry is not difficult. If you possess one of the five senses, poetry is in it. If you can compose text message, tweet or Facebook status, you can write poetry. If you can rap a song, you can rhyme poetry. If you can memorise a prayer, you can recite poetry. If you struggle to make sense of formatted text, poetry is your call. ~ Gloria D. Gonsalves

Writing poetry, which for me was then saying how I felt about this and that, didn't help me to understand the world I lived in. ~ Grace Paley

Creativity is the result of a struggle between vitality and form. As anyone who has tried to write a sonnet or scan poetry, is aware, the form ideally do not take away from the creativity but may add to it. ~ Rollo May

I started writing poetry as a teenager in suburban Chicago out of emotional desperation. ~ Edward Hirsch

I wanted to be a composer for a while, and for a while, and maybe still, I found writing music much easier than writing poetry. So maybe my brain clings to it. ~ Shane McCrae

The poets are the standard bearers of language. Their work lives or dies word by word. When I write and can hear a clunky sentence, I try to write up to the poetry that I have recited beforehand. ~ Janet Fitch

I like the way words go together and I like the gamesmanship of writing poetry. It is such a challenge. ~ Jeffery Deaver

To be a poet is a condition, not a profession. ~ Robert Frost

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

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

It would be worth the while to select our reading, for books are the society we keep; to read only the serenely true; never statistics, nor fiction, nor news, nor reports, nor periodicals, but only great poems, and when they failed, read them again, or perchance write more. Instead of other sacrifice, we might offer up our perfect (teleia) thoughts to the gods daily, in hymns or psalms. For we should be at the helm at least once a day. ~ Henry David Thoreau

The success of the poem is determined not by how much the poet felt in writing it, but by how much the reader feels in reading it. ~ John Ciardi

The ultimate aim of reading or writing poetry is to enrich one's life experience. ~ Marty Rubin

Why do you always write poetry? Why do you not write prose? Prose is so much more difficult. ~ Walter Pater

In writing poetry, all of one's attention is focused on some inner voice. ~ Li-Young Lee

On Writing Poetry: Take everyday words beyond everyday talent and write them alive. ~ C.J. Heck

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

Poetry can have varied and useful functions; and seduction is apparently something worth writing poetry for. ~ Shira Wolosky

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

Warning for the Poetry Know-It-Alls on Hello Poetry
Poets who say they
'know everything there is to know about poetry',
have pronounced their own extinction.
I've been writing poetry for 45 years
and still consider myself a newbie.

My greatest joy is in learning a little more
about my sublime craft
with each passing day. ~ Beryl Dov

In a notable family called Stein
There were Gertrude, and Ep, and then Ein.
Gert's writing was hazy,
Ep's statues were crazy,
And nobody understood Ein. ~ Bennett Cerf

A midst deceit I found the truth;
there in the rough I found a diamond.
And from the moment we met,
I think of no one else
Today I choose to be, to live and breathe;
to dream, to weep, and to sing in free verse.
And you, the object of my delight:
a like-minded opposite I am myself with,
a mind-fuck times six, seven, eight thousand and three.
I know that you love me with every inch of your deep. ~ Donato DiCristino

When a good poet is confronted with difficult facts that he knows to be true but also are inimical to poetry, he has no choice but to flee to the margins; it was ... this very retreat that allowed him to hear the hidden music that is the source of all art. ~ Orhan Pamuk

I think I'm no different to my friends who are doctors or businessmen or architects - we all started watching films of the golden age together. But whether I'm making films or writing poetry or doing photography, it's very much rooted in my sense of unease. And that's really where everything goes back to. ~ Abbas Kiarostami

In a way I spend my entire life stealing from everything - from the past, from cities I love, from where I grew up - grabbing things, taking not only from architecture but from Italy, art, writing, poetry, music. ~ Renzo Piano

Gradually I find that my whole soul is merging itself into this business of writing, and especially of writing poetry. I am going to try it; and am going to test, in the most rigid way I know, the awful question whether it is my vocation. ~ Sidney Lanier

I began to write poetry when I was about four years old. In other words, I've always been writing poetry. ~ Ernesto Cardenal

He was in the frame of mind when a weaker man would have started writing poetry. ~ P.G. Wodehouse

You can't write poetry on the computer. ~ Quentin Tarantino

I started writing poetry in high school because I wanted desperately to write, but somehow, writing stories didn't appeal to me, and I loved the flow and the feel and sense of poetry, especially that of what one might call formal verse. ~ L.E. Modesitt Jr.

In my more rebellious days I tried to doubt the existence of the sacred, but the universe kept dancing and life kept writing poetry across my life. (Beyond Religion, p. 81) ~ David N. Elkins

I don't think I ever had a morning where I woke up and said I'm going to be a professional poet. I know I've always loved poetry, I've always loved writing poetry and I've always loved sharing poetry. I've also always known that I wanted that to somehow be a very large part of my life and I'm very fortunate that it's such a large part of my life. ~ Sarah Kay

Well, I had this little notion - I started writing when I was eleven, writing poetry. I was passionately addicted to it; it was my great refuge through adolescence. ~ Harry Mathews

I started out in life as a poet; I was only writing poetry all through my 20s. It wasn't until I was about 30 that I got serious about writing prose. While I was writing poems, I would often divert myself by reading detective novels; I liked them. ~ Paul Auster

If you find yourself pulled beyond all practicality toward doing something
writing poetry, building a business, restoring old cars, planting a secret garden; if at four in the morning the right word comes to you, the perfect flower to plant in that particular spot
you are playing your invisible instrument. ~ Joan Oliver Goldsmith

But there exist other, different, methods of infolding-obliquity, compression, and the Seven Types of Ambiguity-a modest estimate of Empson's. The later Joyce, for instance, makes one realize why the German word for writing poetry is 'dichten'- to condense (certainly more poetical than 'composing', i.e. 'putting together'; but perhaps less poetical than the Hungarian kolteni-to hatch). Freud actually believed that to condense or compress several meanings or allusions into a word or phrase was the essence of poetry. It is certainly an essential ingredient with Joyce; almost every word in the great monologues in Finnegans Wake is overcharged with allusions and implications. To revert to an earlier metaphor, economy demands that the stepping stones of the narrative should be spaced wide enough apart to require a significant effort from the reader; Joyce makes him feel like a runner in a marathon race with hurdles every other step and aggravated by a mile-long row of hieroglyphs which he must decipher. Joyce would perhaps be the perfect writer-of the perfect reader existed. ~ Arthur Koestler

After a night spent writing poetry, one is almost happy to hear the milkman at the door. ~ Wallace Stevens

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

So they gave me love in form of poison and tiny little pills, programming my emotions, teaching me how to feel. To act correct and talk correct and answer without knowing the question, because that, my dear, is how you get love. Yes that, dear youth, is how you'll be loved. I tried to medicate my own fucked up little mind with chemicals and adrenaline, tasting sweeter every night, shaking louder every time. Sitting wide awake in bed until the world disappears, writing poetry to concentrate on something real while waiting for the love to arrive.
I've been looking for it night after night, waiting patiently for it to show up, maybe somewhere in between the state of awake and asleep, alive and not so alive, sober and not so sober.
(I lost track of the difference somewhere in between.) ~ Charlotte Eriksson

Writing beautifully - calligraphy - was China's first graphic art form. Although elsewhere in the world people drew first and learned to write later, in China, the reverse was true. First you learned to write beautifully, and then you painted. After mastering those twin skills, you could move on to writing poetry, but many chose to remain just calligraphers, a highly appreciated art form in China. Another ~ Mark Kurlansky

Orlando, who had just dipped her pen in the ink, and was about to indite some reflection upon the eternity of all things, was much annoyed to be impeded by a blot, which spread and meandered round her pen. . . . She dipped it again. The blot increased. She tried to go on with what she was saying but no words came. Next she began to decorate the blot with wings and whiskers, till it became a round-headed monster, something between a bat and a wombat. But as for writing poetry with Basket and Bartholemew in the room, it was impossible. No sooner had she said 'impossible' than, to her astonishment and alarm, the pen began to curve and caracole with the smoothest possible fluency. Her page was written in the neatest sloping Italian hand with the most insipid verses she had ever read in her life:

I am myself but a vile link Amid life's weary chain, But I have spoken hallowed words, Oh, do not say in vain!
. . . . .
She was so changed, the soft carnation cloud Once mantling o'er her cheek like that which eve Hangs o'er the sky, glowing with roseate hue, Had faded into paleness, broken by Bright burning blushes, torches of the tomb,

but here, by an abrupt movement she spilt the ink over the page and blotted it from human sight she hoped for ever. She was all of a quiver, all of a stew. Nothing more repulsive could be imagined than to feel the ink flowing thus in cascades of involuntary inspiration. ~ Virginia Woolf

I caution against communication because once language exist only to convey information, it is dying.
In news articles the relation of the words to the subject is a strong one. The relation of the words to the writer is weak. (Since the majority of your reading has been newspapers, you are used to seeing language function this way).
When you write a poem these relations must reverse themselves: The relation of the word to the subject must weaken – the relation of the words to the writer (you) must take on strength.
This is probably the hardest thing about writing poems

In a poem you make something up, say for example a town, but an imagined town is at least as real as an actual town. If it isn't you may be in the wrong business.
Our triggering subjects, like our words, come from obsessions we must submit to, whatever the social cost. It can be hard. It can be worse 40 years from now if you feel you could have done it and didn't.


RICHARD HUGO
Public versus private poets:

With public poets the intellectual and emotional contents of the words are the same for the reader as for the writer. With the private poet, the words, at least certain key words, mean something to the poet they don't mean to the reader. A sensitive reader perceives this relation of poet to word and in a way that relation – the strange way the poet emotionally possesses his vocabulary – is one of the mysteries and preservative forces of the art.Richard Hugo

Creative Writing Poetry