Dana Goodyear Quotes

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.

I sometimes talk about the making of a poem within the poem.

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

O! for a muse of fire, that would ascend the brightest heaven of invention.

I feel like I am in the service of the poem. The poem isn't something I make. The poem is something I serve.

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 don't think anybody is a poet 24/7, only in those rare moments when a person is producing a poem.

I don't look on poetry as closed works. I feel they're going on all the time in my head and I occasionally snip off a length.

I think what gets a poem going is an initiating line. Sometimes a first line will occur, and it goes nowhere; but other times - and this, I think, is a sense you develop - I can tell that the line wants to continue. If it does, I can feel a sense of momentum - the poem finds a reason for continuing.

When I discovered the lyric poem, that advanced not by narrative steps but by blocks and layers of imagery, I said, 'Gee, I probably could do that. So let me try that.'

Like a pianist runs her fingers over the keys, I'll search my mind for what to say. Now, the poem may want you to write it. And then sometimes you see a situation and think, 'I'd like to write about that.' Those are two different ways of being approached by a poem, or approaching a poem.

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

That impulse I think is a form of love. Poetry is something that comes to you, rather than your having to work out its form beforehand.

When writing poetry, it is not that produces a bright idea, but the bright idea that kindles the fire of.

For it is not metres, but a metre-making argument that makes a poem, - a thought so passionate and alive that like the spirit of a plant or an animal it has an architecture of its own, and adorns nature with a new thing.

(Songwriting) It's a gift. It all comes from somewhere. I started out really young, when I was four, five, six, writing poems, before I could play an instrument. I was writing about things when I was eight or 10 years old that I hadn't lived long enough to experience.

Poems, to me, do not come from ideas, they come from a series of images that you tuck away in the back of your brain. Little photographic snapshots. Then you get the major vision of the poem, which is like a giant magnet to which all these disparate little impressions fly and adhere, and there is the poem!

Rhyme and meter force gaps in meaning so the muse can enter.

The writing of You've Got a Friend was one of the most incredible experiences because it was mostly inspiration. It just came to me almost as we hear it.

Necessity may be the mother of lucrative invention, but it is the death of poetical invention.

Angel and Muse approach from without; the Angel sheds light and the Muse gives form (Hesiod learned of them). Gold leaf or chiton-folds: the poet finds his models in his laurel coppice. But the Duende, on the other hand, must come to life in the nethermost recesses of the blood.

The poet is he who inspires, rather than he who is inspired.

Poetry demands a man with a special gift for it, or else one with a touch of madness in him.

I intended an Ode, And it turned to a Sonnet.

I think poetry is the only domain where a writer you like can truly be said to influence you, because you read and reread a poem so many times that it simply drills itself into your head.