Dana Goodyear Quotes

My poems are almost all written as Diane. I don't have any problems with that, and if other women choose to identify with this, I think that's terrific.

I would say that American poetry has always been a poetry of personal testimony.

It's absolutely crucial to maintain my life as a poet.

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

Verse is not written, it is bled; Out of the poet's abstract head. Words drip the poem on the page; Out of his grief, delight and rage.

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

I think a poet is anybody who wouldn't call himself a poet.

I do not go in search of poetry. I wait for poetry to visit me.

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

I chose poetry. Actually, poetry chose me.

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.

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 wanted to write stories for myself. At first it was purely an aesthetic thing about craft. I just wanted to become good at the art of something. And writing was very private.

A born poet knows in his cradle that a poetic life is the only life worth living.

But you'd have a job to find many of my poems which would seem to be very influenced by a particular person.

I know my voice has a limited range of motion; I don't write dramatic monologues and pretend to be other people. But so far, my voice is broad enough to accommodate most of what I want to put into my poetry. I like my persona; I often wish I were him and not me.

The real biographies of poets are like those of birds, almost identical - their data are in the way they sound. A poet's biography lies in his twists of language, in his meters, rhymes, and metaphors.

I've written poetry most of my life.

Theodore Roethke was a poet I was raised with so he has a lot of sentimental value for me.

I don't look on poetry as closed works. I feel they're going on all the time in my head and I occasionally snip off a length.

The music of language became extremely important to me, and obvious to me. By the time I was seven I was writing myself. I was a poet.

But I'm too old to be written about as a young poet.

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

I think that the practice of writing every day was what made me remember that writing doesn't have anything to do with publishing books. It can be totally separate and private - a comforting thought.