Marv Levy Quotes

Sunday is a likely day to write a poem. Because poetry is a piece of language flying around: you'll find notebooks, something on your phone. It's about finding them and getting them off that crumpled piece of paper and onto my computer.

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.

I'll write lines or words in a notepad. You work on little things and little parts; sometimes they turn into bigger songs.

If I'm walking along the street, ideas come. Ideas about things that I'm interested in. I've jotted them down in the past on bits of paper and then, more recently, on apps in my phone. I've always written poetry since I was a kid.

I don't write down my experiences, but I have a very decent memory. I have tons of books in which I write down phrases as they occur to me. That's how I write songs. I'll need a line and I'll go through the books and find it, the right rhyme and everything.

I sit down and draw from my lyric book. I sit down and start looking through it and see if there is anything that strikes me that I've written.

Sometimes I'll hear a phrase or a word and write it down in my little black notebook (a writer's best mate), then come back to it and work a plot around it.

Many poets write books. They'll tell you: Well, I've got my next book, but there are two poems I need to write, one about x, one about y. This is a wonder to me.

After that, I specifically started writing lyrics. I would like sweat and think and get it all together.

I write the poems first, with only a few exceptions for odd reasons, where I'm given the illustration first.

Somehow, the words don't have any vitality, any life to them, unless I can feel it marking on a paper. That's how I start. Once I'm off, then I switch to the laptop. I think it would all just be prose if it started on a laptop - not that what I do is poetry.

I am never without my lyric book. If anything inspirational happens, I have it there so nothing's forgotten.

My poems always begin with a metaphor, but my way into the metaphor may be a word, an image, even a sound. And I rarely know the nature of the metaphor when I begin to write, but there is an attentiveness that a writer develops, a sudden alertness that is much like the feel of a fish brushing against a hook.

I work on words, mostly, toward them being poetry or short stories, and then some of those become songs. They all find their place in the world, but they all start off in the same place. I'm always painting and drawing as well, and it's an ongoing creative assignment.

I think that there are fiction writers for whom that works well. I could never do it. I feel as if, by the time I see that it's a poem, it's almost written in my head somewhere.

A novel is a work of poetry. In order to write it, one must have tranquility of spirit and of impression.

With fiction, I tend to get to my desk and start writing. Poetry I write in my head, often while walking, so that my poems have an organic quality, hopefully.

Robert Frost had always said you mustn't think of the last line first, or it's only a fake poem, not a real one. I'm inclined to agree.

I would run into the corner store, the bodega, and just grab a paper bag or buy juice - anything just to get a paper bag. And I'd write the words on the paper bag and stuff these ideas in my pocket until I got back. Then I would transfer them into the notebook.

I write almost everything, actually. Songs, poems, stories. And stories out of every genre, too.

I try not to think too much about where my voice comes from. I'm channeling characters and emotion to come up with beautiful words that tell a story.

The poet doesn't invent. He listens.

I can clear my mind, and lyrics just come out; it's very easy for me.

I keep a composition book with me at all times to write rhymes, to write down ideas, write down my thoughts, you know just so I don't forget any ideas.

It doesn't matter where I'm at - if I'm somewhere sitting still for more than an hour, rhymes start popping in my head... It's just kinda instilled in me.