Dennis Potter Quotes

My first book was poetry, but I didn't write it first. I wrote it third. So my first two books were prose.

I began the way nearly everybody I ever heard of - I began writing poetry. And I find that to be quite usual with writers, their trying their hand at poetry.

I always knew that was what I wanted to do - to write, particularly poetry.

I am still interested in the long or serial poem, but have written a few smaller things. I may start sending to journals again in a year or so... that's about it.

Poetry was the first step, and from the age of 18, there was nothing else I wanted to do.

I always wrote little things when I was younger. My first opus was a book of poems put down in a spiral notebook at five or six, handsomely accompanied by crayon illustrations.

Elaine Equi has been publishing her observant, often playful poetry for some 30 years, extending and deepening the range of her intrinsically wry voice.

Everyone thinks they're going to write one book of poems or one novel.

I want to be a poet and have a chance to explore that and let people know what's really on my mind.

I love to read poetry but I haven't written anything that I'm willing to show anybody.

The idea that a poem was a made thing stayed with me, and I decided then that I wanted to be an artist, not just a diarist. So I put myself through a kind of apprenticeship in writing poetry, and I understood even then that my practice as a poet was deeply related to my reading.

Well, I still write poetry, but I wouldn't call myself a poet.

Of course, I have to consider that I've written a lot of prose, but I do in my heart think of myself as being originally, and still primarily, a poet.

Nobody really knows whether they are a poet. I knew I was interested from the age of 15.

I remember writing these terrible poems when I was, like, nine and discovered alliteration.

I'm conscious of a series of circles working its way through my life. And at this particular moment I have come round to the beginning of my writing cycle. It begins with poetry. There's hardly a day that goes past on which I don't write poetry.

I began to imitate what I was reading, and I started to become a poet, even though what I was writing were not good poems.

I realized poetry's the thing that I can do 'cause I can stick at it and work with tremendous intensity.

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.

Back then, I couldn't have left a poem a year and gone back to it.

But most commonly, it's one poem that I work on with a lot of intensity.

I want to branch out. I want to write. I write poetry. I want to see my children grow up well.

I hadn't published a book of poetry in over a decade because I've been very ill. As I got better and started to write, I said, 'Wow, even as an old woman, I could have a selected book of poems.'

I'm not a rock star writing poetry. I don't feel like a rock star and I don't know what one is, actually. I'm a goalie/poet or a hotel guest/poet or a father/poet.

I've been writing poetry seriously since about 2008, 2009.