Yusef Komunyakaa Quotes

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.

Perhaps first and foremost is the challenge of taking what I find as a reader and making it into a poem that, primarily, has to be a plausible poem in English.

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

Well, I like to write poetry. I'm a published poet.

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

In the world of poetry there are would-be poets, workshop poets, promising poets, lovesick poets, university poets, and a few real poets.

One problem we face comes from the lack of any agreed sense of how we should be working to train ourselves to write poetry.

I did literature at university, so I had a real relationship with poetry, but they don't make many films about the world of a poet.

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.

Jim wanted to be known as a poet, first and foremost.

What I try to do is to go into a poem - and one writes them, of course, poem by poem - to go into each poem, first of all without having any sense whatsoever of where it's going to end up.

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.

When you begin to write poems because you love language, because you love poetry. Something happens that makes you write poems. And the writing of poems is incredibly pleasurable and addictive.

There are no poetic ideas; only poetic utterances.

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.

My intention is to write poems. That's what I've been doing most of my life.

Writers must... take care of the sensibility that houses the possibility of poems.

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

'Finally' actually started out as a poem. I always wrote poetry, and pretty soon I figured out that if I could write poems, I could write songs.

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

The subject of the poem usually dictates the rhythm or the rhyme and its form. Sometimes, when you finish the poem and you think the poem is finished, the poem says, "You're not finished with me yet," and you have to go back and revise, and you may have another poem altogether. It has its own life to live.

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

Working alone on a poem, a poet is of all artists the most free. The poem can be written with a modicum of technology, and can be published, in most cases, quite cheaply.

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

Romantic poetry had its heyday when people like Lord Byron were kicking it large. But you try and make a living as a poet today, and you'll find it's very different!