Joseph Brodsky Quotes

Robert Frost: plain, strong, simple, and mean.

When I think of Emily Dickinson, there's not one particular poem of hers that jumps out, but I do have a very vivid image of an ill woman with giant eyes who wants to write about the sun exploding.

Whereas if you were writing an op-ed piece or an essay, somebody would be asking, "What's your point?" With poetry you can stay in a moment for as long as you want. Poetry is about metaphor, about a thing standing in for something else. It's the thing that opens out to something else. What that something else is changes for readers. So what's on the page - it falls away.

Like a piece of ice on a hot stove the poem must ride on its own melting.

From the simplest lyric to the most complex novel and densest drama, literature is asking us to pay attention. Pay attention to the frog. Pay attention to the west wind. Pay attention to the boy on the raft, the lady in the tower, the old man on the train. In sum, pay attention to the world and all that dwells therein and thereby learn at last to pay attention to yourself and all that dwells therein.

Success is a finished book, a stack of pages each of which is filled with words. If you reach that point, you have won a victory over yourself no less impressive than sailing single-handed around the world.

One day while studying a Yeats poem I decided to write poetry the rest of my life. I recognized that a single short poem has room for history, music, psychology, religious thought, mood, occult speculation, character, and events of one's own life. I still feel surprised that such various substances can find shelter and nourishment in a poem. A poem in fact may be a sort of nourishing liquid, such as one uses to keep an amoeba alive. If prepared right, a poem can keep an image or a thought or insights on history or the psyche alive for years, as well as our desires and airy impulses.

I am talking about poetry. It's like that line from [John] Yeats: I go back to "where all the ladders start/ In the foul rag and bone shop of the heart."

Poetry is a sleep-maker for that which sits up late in us listening for the footfall of the future on to-day's doorstep.

I write poems, have always written them, to transcend the painfully personal and reach the universal.

One could do worse than be a swinger of birches.

What is poetry? Do not enquire. The secret dies by prying. How does the heart beat? I fainted when I saw it on the screen, opening and closing like a flower ... Poetry is like this, it is life moving, terrible, vivid. Look the other way when you write, or you might faint.

There aren't that many people who have written seven-book series, taken them 17 years. Actually finishing was (the) most remarkable feeling I've ever had. (I) couldn't tell you which was uppermost - euphoria or feeling devastated.

Poetry is a rich, full-bodied whistle, cracked ice crunching in pails, the night that numbs the leaf, the duel of two nightingales, the sweet pea that has run wild, Creation's tears in shoulder blades.

We don’t read and write poetry because it’s cute. We read and write poetry because we are members of the human race.

Words make love on the page like flies in the summer heat and the poet is only the bemused spectator.

The novel is final form; it's the ultimate individual final form. Television and motion pictures never get there. You'd be fabulous to think that something you write is even going to be filmed. I give it the best shot of which I'm capable. But it's more a payday for me. And if I didn't have alimony and the full-time assistant.

Leo Connellan has retained his soul and voice in Provincetown and Other Poems.

I've learned a lot as a writer about poetry.

Prose is walking; poetry is flying

The very best of all Merwin: I have been reading William since 1952, and always with joy.

Writing has made me a better man. It has put me in contact with those fleeting moments which prove the existence.

It took me 10 years to write a story that pleased me - that I could look at after it was published and not cringe.

All the world can be found in poetry. All you need to see and hear. All the moments, good and bad, joyous and sad.

I require silence to write the way an apple tree requires winter to make fruit. Being with people is intimate and joyous, but at some point, I'll wander off by myself. The paradox is that what began in childhood as an act of necessary solitude has led me straight to a life with others, in which I fly to China or Lithuania or northern Minnesota to read my poems and talk with other people who love language made into a lathe on which a life can be tuned and be turned.