Randall Jarrell Quotes

I always see nice images like that but I don't know what to do with them. I guess you share them with someone. Or you write them down in a poem. I had so many of those little images, but I never shared them or wrote any of them down.

Poets have to keep pushing, pushing, against the darkness, and write their way out of it as well.

A poet never takes notes. You never take notes in a love affair.

Memory has always been fundamental for me. In fact, remembering what I had forgotten is the way most of the poems get started.

Writing that flirts with incoherence can just as readily flounder as writing characterized by simplicity and composure. There is no reliable formula for originality, and strategies that are distinguished as innovative in their first incarnation can quickly become stale in the hands of lesser artists.

When you think intensely and beautifully, something happens. That something is called poetry. If you think that way and speak at the same time, poetry gets in your mouth. If people hear you, it gets in their ears. If you think that way and write at the same time, then poetry gets written. But poetry exists in any case. The question is only: are you going to take part, and if so, how?

Write what you love and love what you write.

We are living in a world where the individual must learn to command the raw materials of expression. He must not be dependent all the time on the ready-made, the finished product. It's the transferring, the changing of the raw into what is the expression of your own self – the whole joy and satisfaction and frustration of life is built into this.

I like the feeling of being able to confront an experience and resolve it as art.

The good thing about painting from memory is that so much is forgotten.

Poets of course are even more unpredictable than other writers, overwhelmed as they are by the moment they inhabit and finding it difficult to connect yesterday with tomorrow.

Take a step, breathe in the world, give it out again in story, poem, song, art.

Art is not living. It is the use of living. The artist has the ability to take the living and use it in a certain way and produce art.

Poetry keeps longing alive.

I keep all my poems in my journals and lock them away. They are the start of everything.

In dance, in composition, in sculpture, the experience is the same: we are more the conduit than the creator of what we express.

Do not imagine that Art is something which is designed to give gentle uplift and self-confidence . Art is not a brassiere. At least, not in the English sense. But do not forget that brassiere is the French word for life-jacket.

For art is order, but it is born out of the chaos of life.

The poetry and the songs that you are suppose to write, I believe are in your heart. You just have to open up your heart and not be afraid to get them out.

As an artist, everybody has the opportunity to celebrate and speak their truth.

Instead of noting down things I’m unlikely to forget, I will write a poem. Even if I have never written one before and even if I never do so again, I will at least know that I once had the courage to put my feelings into words.

poetry is the breath and finer spirit of knowledge

They wanted to come in after the pounds", explained Pooh, "so I let them. It's the best way to write poetry, letting things come.

As soon as you start to think of that thing that you want to convey or say, you can always just say it much better than you can actually rhyme it or stuff it into a song. It's very, very difficult to just kind of get your point across without going the back way. And you have to be good at that, to not think about things so hard. Let the pen take over, so that it's somebody else's job to dissect the lyrics and tell you what you're all about.

Art is love and it covers. It sheilds.