Lucille Clifton Quotes

I never think about poetry except when I'm writing it. I mean my poetry.

I think there's probably always been visions and voices, and these were variously ascribed to the divine or demonic or the muses. I think many poets still feel they depend on an inner voice, or a voice which tells them what to do.

I don't write songs, songs write me.

The act of song writing and recording became one and the same to me; because I essentially recorded everything I did from the day I began trying to write songs. I've always had a lot to say. I'd always written poems.

You know creators, composers, need a palette for life, a color for life.

I don't outline; I listen to a kind of whisper inside the material.

Poetry for me is very easy. It's like a lightning bolt. I feel this calling, and the first line of the poem comes into my head, and I just have to go to the page, to the typewriter, to the computer or whatever and write it.

Mostly the thought and the verse come inseparably. In my poem Poetics, it's as close as I come to telling how I do it.

Whatever I hear in my head is what I play.

I'd always loved poetry and I'd always loved writing music and composing music, but I hadn't thought of putting the two together until around that time.

The poet doesn't invent. He listens.

Sometimes when I'm writing lyrics, it's a very loose train of thought, and wherever that takes me, I let it flow.

When I write songs, it happens very quickly, sometimes 10 to 15 minutes, and I draw inspiration from everything.

But it's silly to suggest the writing of poetry is something ethereal, a sort of soul-crashing, devastating emotional experience that wrings you. I have no fancy ideas about poetry. ... It doesn't come to you on the wings of a dove. It's something you have to work hard at.

I think subconsciously or selfishly I knew that I was supposed to do something. It was like a thumping or a throbbing saying, "Yes, this what you've been waiting for." But you're a little dim to those spiritual thoughts when you're dumb like me. So I did have to get a little bit of a kick. I played it for a bunch of people and I think their reactions were warm and deep enough that they gave me the courage to get [the record] out there.

There's very little of the intentional about the business of writing poetry, as least as far as I can see.

The art of writing is mysterious; the opinions we hold are ephemeral , and I prefer the Platonic idea of the Muse to that of Poe, who reasoned, or feigned to reason, that the writing of a poem is an act of the intelligence. It never fails to amaze me that the classics hold a romantic theory of poetry, and a romantic poet a classical theory.

The writer who possesses the creative gift owns something of which he is not always master - something that, at times, strangely wills and works for itself.

Sometimes the fragment of a conversation, the color of the sky, the image in a dream, has everything to do with where the song begins.

Angel and Muse approach from without; the Angel sheds light and the Muse gives form (Hesiod learned of them). Gold leaf or chiton-folds: the poet finds his models in his laurel coppice. But the Duende, on the other hand, must come to life in the nethermost recesses of the blood.

In the beginning, there was a kind of energy that - like an urgency to express myself, and the songs just couldn't be held in. But I think it changes, the nature of how that - what that energy is. And I need to court the muse in a much more serious way.

At the very beginning when I begin writing a poem I try not to think of the audience or anyone at all except for trying to get at the very center of what is driving that poem. In a way it's like analyzing myself.

I find it a great and fatal difference whether I court the Muse, or the Muse courts me. That is the ugly disparity between age and youth.

No poem is worth anything unless it starts from a poetic trance, out of which you can be wakened by interruption as from a dream. In fact, it is the same thing.