Tim Seibles Quotes

In poetry, I have, since very young, loved poetry in translation. The Chinese, the French, the Russians, Italians, Indians and early Celts: the formality of the translator's voice, their measured breath and anxiety moves me as it lingers over the original.

I think that you certainly don't have to be aged and travel the world to write a poem.

What I like about modelling is that it has given me that opportunity to travel and experience different cultures, work with creative people, and now it's given me a voice, and with that voice hopefully I can do good things with it.

Every now and then I read a poem that does touch something in me, but I never turn to poetry for solace or pleasure in the way that I throw myself into prose.

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

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.

A poet's autobiography is his poetry. Anything else is just a footnote.

We simply have not kept in touch with poetry.

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.

I don't think that I ever believed that poetry would be a career. I have always thought of poems as something more private than professional... I would never introduce myself as a poet. I will always have some other thing that I am.

So few people read poetry. That's sad, isn't it?

For awhile after you quit Keats all other poetry seems to be only whistling or humming.

That's another pompous expression that is out of fashion, to say that poetry is a gift. It sounds pompous because you say, 'Who gave you the gift, and what is this gift?' And the gift is where I am; the gift is what I have come out of, the people around me who, I think, are beautiful people.

The phenomenon of Instagram poets - who are also, to be fair, Tumblr poets and Pinterest poets - has been one of the more surprising side-effects of the selfie age.

Poetry is not a creed or dogma. It is a special way of speaking and listening.

I'm going to put every aspect of myself out into the world and try to convey it through photography.

Poetry too is a little incarnation, giving body to what had been before invisible and inaudible.

I'm an actress, primarily. I love to write poetry. I've been writing poetry since I was 12 years old.

Poem for Liu Ya-tzu I cannot forget how in Canton we drank tea and in Chungking went over our poems when leaves were yellowing. Thirty-one years ago and now we come back at last to the ancient capital Peking. In this season of falling flowers I read your beautiful poems. Be careful not to be torn inside. Open your vision to the world. Don't say that waters of Kumming Lake are too shallow. We can watch fish better here than in the Fuchun River in the south.

I am composed of contradictions, which is why poetry is a better form for me than philosophy

Thus poetry, regarded as a vehicle of thought, is especially impressive partly because it obeys all the laws of effective speech, and partly because in so doing it imitates the natural utterances of excitement.

Words are my passion / And out of them and me / I would create beauty.

Anything I can sing, I call a song. Anything I can't sing, I call a poem.