David Antin Quotes

What you compose with is neither here nor there, you compose with words, or you compose with stone plants and trees, or you compose with events; the Sheriff's officer, or whatever.

If I'm working on a poem, it's at the forefront of my mind; I'm working on it when I'm cooking dinner or stretched out on the sofa. But if I don't really have it by the 10th draft, I know it just isn't going to jell.

The process of composition, messing around with paragraphs and trying to make really good prose, is hardwired into my personality.

I like the way words go together and I like the gamesmanship of writing poetry. It is such a challenge.

I really wanted to work hard on my lyrics.

I always say that I'll have a go and see whether the poem works and if it does, then fine.

I am a writer of fragments.

When I write, I write everything from a rhythm point.

I like bringing my poet brain and sensibility to lyrics I write.

I've worked really, really hard on my lyricism.

If the poet wants to be a poet, the poet must force the poet to revise. If the poet doesn't wish to revise, let the poet abandon poetry and take up stamp-collecting or real estate.

I write dozens and dozens of pages more than I need, and then edit them down to size. It's more like sculpture than construction.

I have a high guilt quotient. A poem can go through as many as 50 or 60 drafts. It can take from a day to two years-or longer.

I like rhyme because it is memorable, I like form because having to work to a pattern gives me original ideas.

Poets deal in writing about feelings and trying to find the language and images for intense feelings.

You become a great writer by writing.

Sometimes I write quickly, sometimes I spend several weeks on a single poem. I would really love for readers not to be able to guess which of the poems took so much work!

At each moment, a poem might grow into a totally different shape. It is not so much like working in a garden. It is more as if you remade the garden every day.

To write regular verses destroys an infinite number of fine possibilities, but at the same time it suggests a multitude of distant and totally unexpected thoughts.

I write a chapter, then edit it and edit it and edit it and edit it. I don't think we mine creativity from within. It's bestowed from on high, from God.

The beautiful part of writing is that you don't have to get it right the first time, unlike, say, a brain surgeon. You can always do it better, find the exact word, the apt phrase, the leaping simile.

Poetry is a mirror which makes beautiful that which is distorted.

I try not to be overly literal. When I'm writing songs, I write down a lot of words, and then I try to simplify it. I like to give people hints or words that make visual pictures for them.

Well, I like to write poetry. I'm a published poet.

The business of the poet is not to find new emotions, but to use the ordinary ones and, in working them up into poetry, to express feelings which are not in actual emotions at all.