Quotes About Expression

One does not read a poem by Gwendolyn Brooks with hopes that it will grant him a career in engineering; he does so because poetry helps him see something in the world that he might not have seen before.

I want the poem to be an experience - for both the listener and for myself.

The question of sort of music and history, I think, are so important to understanding the poem as an idea but also us as people in the world.

In many ways, I feel like the form carries so much of the weight in a poem, obviously. But I think we sometimes forget that.

The main thing a poem ought to be is musical. It should be rhythmic. You should hear it as a musical piece in your head as you're writing it.

I've approached every character I've ever played with a poem, first and foremost.

I can write a poem in 10 minutes. I like writing songs; I can write songs in 5 or 10 minutes. My concentration seems very short.

For me, to have had an impact with anything that you've done, whether it's a painting, a photo, a poem, or something that you've created, just that experience is enormous. You don't get that all the time.

A poem gives me a chance to have an encounter with a feeling, with an experience, with a wish, with an idea.

They're very different things, a poem and a song, you wouldn't think they would be, but they are.

When you break a poem down in order to perform it, you have to engage closely with many aspects of what it's about, how it works, how it's constructed and so on. If you write a poem alongside it, to complement it, you start to feel poetry's method, poetry's way of looking at things.

You pass a poem to the audience through the words as embodied literally by the rest of your human form. And the people listening and watching come back at you in an equally embodied way.

I like Beethoven, especially the poems.

I started writing after the death of my grandfather - memories, poems, etc. It was very personal; for years I did not share my writing with anyone.

Poems are a form of music, and language just happens to be our instrument - language and breath.

I think my poems immediately come out of the sensuous and emotional experiences I have.

Looking across the many strands of poetry, we can never be certain which poems were only read in private and which were performed - and there are thousands of poems which were performed but never got written down.

I write almost everything, actually. Songs, poems, stories. And stories out of every genre, too.

I don't write poems. I don't give flowers to girls... yet.

The Hollywood movies are more like novels, and the kinds of films I make are more like poems.

I began writing early - very, very early... I was already writing short stories for the radio and selling poems to poetry and art festivals; I was involved in school plays; I wrote essays, so there was no definite moment when I said, 'Now I'm a writer.' I've always been a writer.

I write short phrases and used to think they were poems!

I work on words quite separately to music. They're both ongoing, and I don't ever feel like I'm working in a cycle in that respect, because it's every day anyway, no matter what I'm doing. Then I get to a point when I've collected together enough words that seem like they want to be songs rather than poems, or sometimes not.

I like poems and keep sharing them online.