I pretty much drink a cup of coffee, write in my journal for a while, and then sit at a computer in my office and torture the keys. My one saving grace as a writer is that, if I'm having trouble with the novel I'm writing, I write something else, a poem or a short story. I try to avoid writer's block by always writing something.
There's no money in poetry, but then there's no poetry in money, either.
The more transparent the writing, the more visible the poetry.
When I was at school, I was terrible at algebra and arithmetic, but I was always the best at English and literature. And acting, of course.
Lyrics are very important to me. I like speaking to women and saying what I mean.
I sit on a man's back choking him and making him carry me and yet assure myself and others that I'm sorry for him and wish to lighten his load by all possible means --- except by getting off his back.
Poetry, I feel, is a tyrannical discipline. You've got to go so far so fast in such a small space; you've got to burn away all the peripherals.
You campaign in poetry. You govern in prose.
Poetry is not a matter of feelings, it is a matter of language. It is language which creates feelings.
I enjoy reading books.
A poem begins with a lump in the throat
It's always a combination of physics and poetry that I find inspiring. It's hard to wrap your head around things like the Hubble scope.
My songs are somewhere between story and situation. There's also character and mood. I'm an intuitive writer, both with instrumentals and songs with words.
Who casts to write a living line, must sweat.
You have to have been in love to write poetry.
I have loved you woman as surely as I have named you rust and sand and nylon.
I'm very much a romantic. I'm highly attuned to an older sensibility, which I believe is alive and well. We're not that far ahead of the Romantic Age in society.
I'm not tryin' to come off as the best lyricist.
One ought, everyday, to hear a song, read a fine poem, and, if possible, to speak a few reasonable words.
Nothing is too small. Nothing is too, quote-unquote, ordinary or insignificant. Those are the things that make up the measure of our days, and they're the things that sustain us. And they're the things that certainly can become worthy of poetry.
I'm a fan of creative writing and telling stories.
I wanted a line in a poem to be the hollow ney of the dervish orchestra whose plaintive wail is a call to God. But all I achieved was awkward shrieking. Not even the pure shriek of a reed in the rain.
The problem with writing a book in verse is, to be successful, it has to sound like you knocked it off on a rainy Friday afternoon. It has to sound easy. When you can do it, it helps tremendously because it's a thing that forces kids to read on. You have this unconsummated feeling if you stop.
Poetry is a response to the daily necessity of getting the world right.
Music begins to atrophy when it departs too far from the dance... poetry begins to atrophy when it gets too far from music.
