Margo Jefferson 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.

Once they're on paper, they're gone. I like to do as much with the words, as far as image goes.

Writing poems is a chance to construct spaces that I want to imaginatively inhabit.

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.

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.

For me, literature is a complex game, both mental and concrete, which is acted out in a physical manner on the page.

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.

A poem records emotions and moods that lie beyond normal language, that can only be patched together and hinted at metaphorically.

I consider a poem to be a kind of experiment where a number of elements are brought together under test conditions to see how they will interact to create meaning or relevance.

Poetry is not a matter of feelings, it is a matter of language. It is language which creates feelings.

A poet is someone who stands outside in the rain hoping to be struck by lightning.

I love the feeling of creating pictures in someone's mind just by spelling out the right lyrical combination.

And if they haven't got poetry in them, there's nothing you can do that will produce it.

Lapped in poetry, wrapped in the picturesque, armed with logical sentences and inalienable words.

Poetry is not a genre in harmony with the modern world; its innermost nature is hostile or indifferent to the dogmas of modern times, progress and the cult of the future.

I swim in a sea of words. They flow around me and through me and, by a process that is not fully clear to me, some delicate hidden membrane draws forth the stuff that is the necessary condition of my life.

I'm always writing; my phone is full of ideas - melodies and lyrics and stuff.

I do think that all of us think in poems.

Poetry is that art which selects and arranges the symbols of thought in such a manner as to excite the imagination the most powerfully and delightfully.

The object of poetic activity is essentially language: whatever his beliefs and convictions, the poet is more concerned with words than with what these words designate.

I love playing with words and texture.

The poetic act consists of suddenly seeing that an idea splits up into a number of equal motifs and of grouping them; they rhyme.

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.

For Stevie, the words are of prime importance; the song moves around the words, rather than the words moving around the song.