Carolyn Kizer Quotes

In the fall term of 1933-34 I was on my family farm in Maine.

My house is surrounded on three sides by cornfields.

And so I love films that are kind of rural in atmosphere. And you know, it's just a nice place to be day after day. All be it, it can be hard, it can be hard work. You can get hot.

Now I live in the middle of nowhere on a working cattle ranch.

I like rural areas.

Somerset has a wonderful wildness about it - it hasn't been tamed. This is farming country, and there's a realness here - I love it.

My childhood home backed onto wheat and cotton fields.

My house borders horse farms, and I can look out my window and see the horses and the new colts. It's really peaceful.

Like a pianist runs her fingers over the keys, I'll search my mind for what to say. Now, the poem may want you to write it. And then sometimes you see a situation and think, 'I'd like to write about that.' Those are two different ways of being approached by a poem, or approaching a poem.

Northern Wisconsin, where I'm from, is so ridiculously rural.

I grew up in a really rural area in Maryland.

I always turn to Frank O'Hara and David Berman's 'Actual Air,' which came out in 1999. He's a poet I haven't tired of.

I'm from San Bernardino, California. It's, like, all cows and dairies and very open.

Yes, I do write poetry. It's very therapeutic. I'm influenced by Pablo Neruda and Gulzar Saab. It's all very personal.

I've lived in Kansas for more than thirty years, and for half of those, I was part of a ranching family, so I'm writing about things I know and love.

I have seen rural life and met all kinds of people.

Once a year I try writing a poem, usually because I've read some poetry that amazed me and I want to do that.

I had to drive to Minneapolis once, and went on a back road just to see the country. But there was nothing to see. It's just flat and hot, and full of corn and soybeans and hogs. Every once in a while you come across a farm or some dead little town where the liveliest thing is the flies.

Let beeves and home-bred kine partake The sweets of Burn-mill meadow; The swan on still St. Mary's Lake Float double, swan and shadow!

I've always felt that the poems I've written which have historical context are hopefully not just simply plucking something out of history and saying great, let's write about that. In every case what has happened is that I've become fascinated or haunted by something and couldn't shake it.

I had a farm in Africa, at the foot of the Ngong Hills.

A farm is an irregular patch of nettles bounded by short-term notes, containing a fool and his wife who didn't know enough to stay in the city.

There are things which some people never attempt during their whole lives, but one of these is not poetry. Poetry attacks all human beings sooner or later, and, like the measles, is mild or violent according to the age of the sufferer.

In a word, poetry can not exist without emotion, or, if you will, without a movement of the soul which regulates the words.