James Schuyler Quotes

How does one happen to write a poem: where does it come from? That is the question asked by the psychologists or the geneticists of poetry.

The subject of the poem usually dictates the rhythm or the rhyme and its form. Sometimes, when you finish the poem and you think the poem is finished, the poem says, "You're not finished with me yet," and you have to go back and revise, and you may have another poem altogether. It has its own life to live.

It can be dismaying, all the same, for a novelist to compare the slowness of the writing with the speed of the reading. Novels are read in a matter of days, even hours. A writer may labor for weeks over a particular passage that will have its effect on a reader for an instant - and that effect may be subliminal or barely noticed.

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

Lyrical poets have to be in touch with visceral experience. I've always tried to avoid virtual experiences. That's emerging in my fiction.

I'm really not responsible for what mental operation people have when they're reading my books other than the ones which are created by literary effects.

If I've vividly laid out the narrative, the reader will come to his own conclusions.

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.

Naturally, the reader has access only to the events I show and the way I show them, but as has been said, there's generally a good deal of ambiguity in that presentation.

The way a book is read, which is to say, the qualities a reader brings to a book can have as much to do with its worth as anything the author puts into it.

How do poems grow? They grow out of your life.

I don't put a lot of description in the books because I write books the way I like to read them, and that is I like to build images and be a creative reader, and so I write that way.

I learn a lot about my poems when I read them by the way people respond to them.

The writer will write in his or her words, but the readers, even when they are not reading you, will take it elsewhere entirely.

I don't believe a good poet is very often deliberately obscure. A poet writes in a way necessary to him or her; the reader may then find the poem difficult.

Almost anything is too much. I am trying in my poems to have the reader be the experiencer. I do not want to be there. It is not even a walk we take together.

The few bad poems which occasionally are created during abstinence are of no great interest.

It's funny: I like being surprised as a reader, so it's difficult for me to spoil my own stuff.

I don't think anybody is a poet 24/7, only in those rare moments when a person is producing a poem.

I don't know if younger poets read a lot of, you know, the poets - the established poets. There was a lot of pretty boring stuff to sort of put up with and to add to, to make something vital from.

All that a critic, as critic, can give poets is the deadly encouragement that never ceases to remind them of how heavy their inheritance is.

As writers, we do our best to conjure a world so vivid that the reader can practically walk through it - but we're still only using words and relying on readers to do a lot of work of imagining. Providing pictures as well as words offers a whole new dimension to the experience of consuming a story.

I think readers' imaginations are far more powerful than anything you can put on a page and, therefore, can conjure up graphic images for themselves, which I think you just have to nudge them towards.

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.

I've had trouble with criticism, I guess. It's hard to know what role criticism plays in either encouraging poets or in getting other people to read them.