#poem

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. ↗

— Anne Stevenson

#condense #deal #emotions #enjoy #express

I work very hard on all my poems, but most of the work consists of trying not to sound as if I had worked. I try to make them sound as natural as possible, but within a quite strict form, which to my ears has a lot to do with musical rhythm and sound. ↗

— Anne Stevenson

#ears #form #had #hard #i

Pain is filtered in a poem so that it becomes finally, in the end, pleasure. ↗

— Mark Strand

#becomes #end #filtered #finally #in the end

And at least in poetry you should feel free to lie. That is, not to lie, but to imagine what you want, to follow the direction of the poem. ↗

— Mark Strand

#feel #follow #free #imagine #least

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