Quotes About Emotion

Manipulating shadows and tonality is like writing music or a poem.

I keep the drafts of each poem in color-coded folders. I pick up the folders according to how I feel about that color that day.

The beautiful feeling after writing a poem is on the whole better even than after sex, and that's saying a lot.

Often people, when they're confronted with a poem, it's like someone who keep saying 'what is the meaning of this? What is the meaning of this?' And that dulls us to the other pleasures poetry offers.

A really good poem is full of music.

You can say a lot more with a poem than you can with a song, but with a song you can really be more powerful with it. You can express it a lot more powerfully.

The most exciting thing is to read a poem out loud for the first time.

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

The number of people who read a poem is not as important as how the poem affects those who read it.

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

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.

I've always thought my poems told stories.

I like poems that are complex.

Many of my poems are not sexual.

I tend to like poems that engage me - that is to say, which do not bore me.

I don't write poems and put them to music. Just let things flow.

I want to write poems which are very emotional, but I would have some hesitation in saying I want to write poems which are sentimental.

If you read Keats's poems, they're often full of doubts and anxieties. They can be quite tough.

The years rolled their brutal course down the hill of time. Still poor, my clothes still smelling of the horse barn, still writing those doubtful poems where too much emotion clashed with too many words.

Heartbreak was the impetus to me writing poems and music in the first place.

I don't think I've ever written a poem whose intention was just to be funny. I've written poems that start out funny and often shift into something more serious.

I love my funny poems, but I'd rather break your heart. And if I can do both in the same poem, that's the best.

I'm trying to make the poems as musical as I can - from the inception. So that whether they're read on the page, or people read them aloud, or I read them aloud, the musicality will be kind of a given.