Poetic Journey Quotes

A poem begins in delight and ends in wisdom.

Back then, I couldn't have left a poem a year and gone back to it.

If you laughed earlier in the poem, and I bring you close to tears in the end, that's the best.

In Northern Ireland, helicopters are not usually used to promote poetry.

When I started to take literature and poetry classes, I just started to get inspired by these new incredible works of art that I had never seen or heard of before. I wrote a lot of bad high-school poetry, just like pretty much everyone did, I think, at some point. For me, the inspiration never really stopped.

The figure a poem makes. It begins in delight and ends in wisdom.

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.

Still, no one finally knows what a poet is supposed either to be or to do. Especially in this country, one takes on the job—because all that one does in America is considered a "job"—with no clear sense as to what is required or where one will ultimately be led. In that respect, it is as particular an instance of a "calling" as one might point to. For years I've kept in mind, "Many are called but few are chosen." Even so "called," there were no assurances that one would be answered.

The best poems come from the world, go through the poet, and go back in to the world.

I see the shape of the poem before I start writing, and the writing is just the process of arriving at the shape.

I need to look back on my poetic ventures, make sense of them as a whole, and move forward... and to experiment without external demands.

As Popa penetrates deeper into his life, with book after book, it begins to look like a Universe passing through a Universe. It is one of the most exciting things in modern poetry, to watch this journey being made.

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

Most poets in their youth begin in adolescent sadness. I find it more rewarding to end in gladness.

I think it's good not to make demands on the reader too early. But as the poem goes on, I want the journey of the poem to lead into some interesting places.

One of these poems I wrote after having been here only a month. The other, I wrote this morning. In the space between the two poems, I have found acres of grace

I know the sag of the unfinished poem. And I know the release of the poem that is finished.

As I lay asleep in Italy There came a voice from over the Sea, And with great power it forth led me To walk in the visions of Poesy.

The idea that a poem was a made thing stayed with me, and I decided then that I wanted to be an artist, not just a diarist. So I put myself through a kind of apprenticeship in writing poetry, and I understood even then that my practice as a poet was deeply related to my reading.

I've always had the wish, the need, and the obsession to become a public poet.

There is no Frigate like a book to take us lands away nor any coursers like a page of prancing Poetry.

When I'm writing the poem, I feel like I have to close my eyes. I don't mean literally, but you invite a kind of blindness, and that's the birth of the poem.

I wrote poetry for seven or eight years, maybe longer, before I could say I was a poet. If people asked, I'd say I wrote poetry; I wouldn't go further. I was in my mid- to late-thirties before I felt that I was a poet, which I think meant that I had begun to embody my poems in some way. I wasn't just a writer of them. Hard to say what, as a poet, my place in the world is. Some place probably between recognition and neglect.

Mostly, when I travel, I want to represent my own work well and let others know how I feel about poetry being an important part of life.

I'm trying to write poems that involve beginning at a known place, and ending up at a slightly different place. I'm trying to take a little journey from one place to another, and it's usually from a realistic place, to a place in the imagination.