Harry Mathews Quotes

Lyrics need to be good, but they don't need to be obvious right away.

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

Emily Dickinson has great sound and sense.

Humor, for me, is really a gate of departure. It's a way of enticing a reader into a poem so that less funny things can take place later. It really is not an end in itself, but a means to an end.

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

Jigging veins of rhyming mother wits.

Prose on certain occasions can bear a great deal of poetry; on the other hand, poetry sinks and swoons under a moderate weight of prose.

When you are writing literary writing, you are communicating something subtextual with emotions and poetry. The prose has to have a voice; it's not just typing. It takes a while to get that voice.

You take stuff from different places, and sometimes you stick a line in because it rhymes, not because it makes sense.

I like poems that are little games.

A poem can have an impact, but you can't expect an audience to understand all the nuances.

I love to compare different time frames. Poetry can evoke the time of the subject. By a very careful choice of words you can evoke an era, completely throw the poem into a different time scale.

Profound subject matter can be encompassed in small space - for proof, look at any sonnet by Shakespeare!

I'm not a pop song lyric writer. I can't just focus on one simple meaning or even a double entendre.

I like the way words go together and I like the gamesmanship of writing poetry. It is such a challenge.

We know the particular poem, not what it says that we can restate.

In order to make the novel into a polyhistorical illumination of existence, you need to master the technique of ellipsis, the art of condensation. Otherwise, you fall into the trap of endless length.

Poetry is one of the destinies of speech... One would say that the poetic image, in its newness, opens a future to language.

Every so often I find some poems that are too good for the readers of The Atlantic because they are a little too involved with the nature of poetry, as such.

People think of poetry as a school subject... Poetry is very frustrating to students because they don't have a taste for ambiguity, for one thing. That gives them a poetry hangover.

I'm a failed poet. Reading poetry helps me to see the world differently, and I try to infuse my prose with figurative language, which goes against the trend in fiction.

There was a period in my life when I was very young that I wrote a sonnet a day just to learn concision in writing.

Poetry has the ability to create entire moments with just a few choice words. The spacing and line breaks create rhythm, a helpful musicality, a natural flow. The separate stanzas aid in perpetuating a kind of incremental reading, one small chunk at a time.

I like bringing my poet brain and sensibility to lyrics I write.

Poetry has become the higher algebra of metaphors.