Lisel Mueller Quotes

I hardly remember how I started to write poetry. It's hard to imagine what I thought poetry could do.

There must of course be a relationship between translating and making poems of your own, but what it is I just don't know.

I do not go in search of poetry. I wait for poetry to visit me.

I think one of the things that people tend to forget is that poets do write out of life. It isn't some set piece that then gets put up on the shelf, but that the impetus, the real instigation for poetry is everything that's happening around us.

Poetry is almost like my foundation for everything. I almost feel I am a better actor and writer because of it.

Writing poetry helps me to write my fiction; each thing helps the other.

I feel often very close to the ecstasy and anguish which lie at the very heart of poetry - I am writing a lot.

I haven't written poetry in a long time but I read it and I miss it. It is so hard to write. So hard to finish, so hard to find the exact word to make it shine. In honor of my youth I will write a poem to finish this essay. It is spring in the Ozark Mountains. The yellow flowers are blooming and the birds wake me at dawn and last night five planets lined up by the moon in the western sky. If that doesn't inspire me to poetry what will?

Writing a poem is discovering.

When I sit at that typewriter, I have to be frightened of what I'm trying to do. I'm frightened by my own belief that I can actually get a story down on paper.

Women who are inclined to write poetry at all are inspired by being mad at something.

Somehow, the words don't have any vitality, any life to them, unless I can feel it marking on a paper. That's how I start. Once I'm off, then I switch to the laptop. I think it would all just be prose if it started on a laptop - not that what I do is poetry.

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

If a poet is anybody, he is somebody to whom things made matter very little - somebody who is obsessed by Making.

I try and journal every day, and that's where a lot of my lyric comes from.

Something about your life always makes its way into your stories. That's just the nature of the beast.

My greatest joy comes from creativity: from feeling that I have been able to identify a certain aspect of human nature and crystallise a phenomenon in words.

You speak of Lord Byron and me; there is this great difference between us. He describes what he sees I describe what I imagine. Mine is the hardest task.

I work on words, mostly, toward them being poetry or short stories, and then some of those become songs. They all find their place in the world, but they all start off in the same place. I'm always painting and drawing as well, and it's an ongoing creative assignment.

I work best in rhyme and meter. I was most confident of myself in that way.

The aim of the poet, or other artist, is first to make something; and it's impossible to make something out of words and not communicate.

The few bad poems which occasionally are created during abstinence are of no great interest.

After I'd produced about two dozen pen and ink drawings, one evening I decided that they needed poems to accompany them. I still have no idea where that notion came from, but it took me about two hours to produce verses for these creatures.

I've written poetry since I was in the first grade, and it wasn't until I was a little bit older that I realized poetry could be put to music and become a song.

My works really begin in a very simple way. Sometimes it's an image, and sometimes it's words I might write, like a fragment of a poem.