Mahmoud Darwish Quotes

What has any poet to trust more than the feel of the thing? Theory concerns him only until he picks up his pen, and it begins to concern him again as soon as he lays it down.

Magazines are about trust and partnership: We, the editors, will strive always to keep you engaged; you, the readers, are free to engage with us or to reject us.

At each moment, a poem might grow into a totally different shape. It is not so much like working in a garden. It is more as if you remade the garden every day.

Good poets have written in order to describe something or to preach something - with their eye on the object or the end. The essence of the poetry does not lie in the thing described or in the message imparted but in the resulting concrete unity, the poem.

If you know what you are going to write when you're writing a poem, it's going to be average.

Never change the URL of your blog. I've done it once, and I lost much of my readership. It took several months to build up the same reader patterns and trust.

The main thing is to think strategically about what will engage your readers. Trust me when I tell you that few people are eager to read a story whose opening lines sound like a dissertation on giant bugs.

The job of the poet is to render the world - to see it and report it without loss, without perversion. No poet ever talks about feelings. Only sentimental people do.

A poem is a naked person... Some people say that I am a poet.

Reader loyalty will stay because I'm not changing.

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.

The first line is the DNA of the poem; the rest of the poem is constructed out of that first line. A lot of it has to do with tone because tone is the key signature for the poem. The basis of trust for a reader used to be meter and end-rhyme.

I'm pretty much all for poetry in public places - poetry on buses, poetry on subways, on billboards, on cereal boxes.

A good poem looks life straight in the face, unflinching, sincere, equal to revelation through loss or gain.

Take a commonplace, clean it and polish it, light it so that it produces the same effect of youth and freshness and originality and spontaneity as it did originally, and you have done a poet's job. The rest is literature.

My role as an artist is not to make changes [in society] but to inspire changes.

That's my whole point as an artist - I'm trying to get you to turn a page.

Fred Moten is a poet I really love because he changes who is telling the poem all the time.

Trust me, you can't change anything without causing some degree of disruption. It's impossible, that is exactly what change is. Some people are uncomfortable with the disruption that change causes, but the disruption is necessary if anything is going to change.

I think all poets must feel this: that there is constantly something new to be discovered in the language. It's like a thrilling encounter, and you can find things.

Exposition suggests a great trust in the reader, and this expression of trust makes a book feel tender.

The strength of the poetry as we enter into whatever it is we are entering into, will be determined by the clarity of the thinking we put into it.

A poem is good if it contains a new analogy and startles the reader out of the habit of treating words as counters.

Write good content about stuff that you love. Readers will find you.

The time is right to mix sentences with dirt and the sun with punctuation and rain with verbs.