“The world, finally, tries to rob us in lots of ways. I like poems to do a bit of taking back for us.”
—Terry Blackhawk
Posts tagged poems:
A conversation with Robert Kelly
| Robert: | I just got off the phone with a man who thinks he's finally "unpeeled," or, as we know it, parsed, a Frank O'Hara poem. |
| Me: | Unpeeled. Do you think poems should be unpeeled? |
| Robert: | Oh, of course not! Poems shouldn't be unpeeled. They should be eaten whole, peel and all. They should cause indigestion and nausea and heartache. None of this business about trying to find out what the poet really "meant." It's what the poem does to you. |
Poems
They’ve come every day this month.
Once I said I wrote them because
I didn’t have time for anything
else. Meaning, of course, better
things—things other than mere
poems and verses. Now I’m writing
them because I want to.
More than anything because
this is February
when normally not much of anything
happens. But this month
the larches have blossomed,
and the sun has come out
every day.
… For now, stay barefoot. Go
outside … and play.
—Raymond Carver, excerpt from “Poems” in A New Path to the Waterfall (Atlantic Monthly Press, 1989)
Painting: William Chickillo, Larches, n.d
“All pasts are like poems; one can derive a thousand things, but not live in them.”
—John Fowles
“Poets are jails. Poems are the convicts who escape.” —Jean Cocteau
“Be ruthless about your own poems before someone else is.”
—John Berryman
Ask a Question Archive RSS Mobile
Centennial Theme by One by Four Studio. Powered by Tumblr.
