Joseph Brodsky Quotes

I've written poetry most of my life.

Well, I still write poetry, but I wouldn't call myself a poet.

I've been writing poetry seriously since about 2008, 2009.

The reason a poet is a poet is to write poems, not to advertise himself as a poet.

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.

You know, I can imagine not writing a novel and writing poetry only.

I always knew that was what I wanted to do - to write, particularly poetry.

It's the combination of the intimate and the public that I find so exciting about being poet laureate.

I am still interested in the long or serial poem, but have written a few smaller things. I may start sending to journals again in a year or so... that's about it.

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

I can recite poetry, but I cannot write it.

I feel that I'm a poet first. Not only was poetry the first genre in which I wrote, it's the genre that serves as the basis for my practice as a writer.

I began the way nearly everybody I ever heard of - I began writing poetry. And I find that to be quite usual with writers, their trying their hand at poetry.

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

In 1971, when I was 29, I wrote my first volume of poetry. I am a poet, and I have published four books of my poems.

Poems have a different music from ordinary language, and every poem has a different kind of music of necessity, and that's, in a way, the hardest thing about writing poetry is waiting for that music, and sometimes you never know if it's going to come.

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 always wanted to write poems and nothing else.

I shall, in due time, be a Poet.

I love poetry and I've kept everything I've written.

However, poetry does not live solely in books or in school anthologies.

Students often have such a lofty idea of what a poem is, and I want them to realize that their own lives are where the poetry comes from. The most important things are to respect the language; to know the classical rules, even if only to break them; and to be prepared to edit, to revise, to shape.

I have been writing poetry since 1975. My first poetry book was published in 1986.

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.

I love to read poetry but I haven't written anything that I'm willing to show anybody.