#poem

And Robert Lowell, of course - in his poems, we're not located in his actual life. We're located more in the externals, in the journalistic facts of his life. ↗

— Mark Strand

#actual life #course #externals #facts #his

I tend to like poems that engage me - that is to say, which do not bore me. ↗

— Mark Strand

#engage #i #like #me #poems

Usually a life turned into a poem is misrepresented. ↗

— Mark Strand

#into #life #misrepresented #poem #turned

I usually write for the individual reader -though I would like to have many such readers. There are some poets who write for people assembled in big rooms, so they can live through something collectively. I prefer my reader to take my poem and have a one-on-one relationship with it. ↗

— Wislawa Szymborska

#big #collectively #i #individual #like

A lot of young poets today, from what I've heard and experienced, can't get their heads past George W. Bush, and I've heard so many poems about this democracy and this era of politics that I'm kind of bored by it. ↗

— Amber Tamblyn

#bored #bush #democracy #era #experienced

How does one happen to write a poem: where does it come from? That is the question asked by the psychologists or the geneticists of poetry. ↗

— Allen Tate

#come #does #geneticists #happen #how

In a manner of speaking, the poem is its own knower, neither poet nor reader knowing anything that the poem says apart from the words of the poem. ↗

— Allen Tate

#apart #knower #knowing #manner #neither

We know the particular poem, not what it says that we can restate. ↗

— Allen Tate

#particular #poem #restate #says

What is the poem, after it is written? That is the question. Not where it came from or why. ↗

— Allen Tate

#came #poem #question #where #why

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. ↗

— Dylan Thomas

#appear #bad #certainty #conviction #harsh