James Arthur Quotes & Sayings

In my case, performance is part of the medium. Sometimes I feel that it's my main medium, and that the presentation of my poems on the page is secondary. — James Arthur

I don't think I'd ever get any better as a poet if I didn't push myself, very deliberately, to grow. My best poems surprise me, as they should, but I fight them at every turn, possibly just because I'm stubborn. — James Arthur

When I started reciting my own poems in public, I worried that it would seem too theatrical, but now I find recitation very natural, because it allows me to address audiences directly. — James Arthur

For me, poetry is a way of thinking, and like many poets, I'm driven by the idea of trying to find the impossible, perfect words: the words that will hold my subject. — James Arthur

Start listening to what you say. Are your comments and ideas negative? You aren't going become positive if you always say negative things. Do you hear yourself say"I could never do that","I never have any luck","I never get things right". Wow - that's negative self-talk! Try saying"I am going to do that","I am so lucky""I always try to get things right". Can you hear how much better that sounds? — James Arthur

Poetry isn't an efficient tool for preserving experience, any more than it's an efficient mode of communication, but who says that it should be efficient? — James Arthur

As a species, we create tools to control our environment. What excites my imagination is wilderness: our materials' ability to escape our control. — James Arthur

My dad, a mathematician, raised me to believe that mathematics is beautiful, so math is a part of my imaginative terrain. In my late 20s I wrote several 11-line poems because I wanted to create poems that couldn't be uniformly divided into couplets, tercets, or quatrains, 11 being a prime number. — James Arthur

For me, intuitive thinking means associative thinking; intuition causes us to introduce narrative or figurative elements into a poem before we're able to explain why those elements belong. — James Arthur

I like poems that affect me emotionally and also provoke me to further, deeper thought. I enjoy challenge, but not, I think, for its own sake. — James Arthur

I try not to think in terms of what poems or poets should do. Most of us appreciate a wide diversity in music, in cooking, in movies, but in our own medium, poetry, we often fail to make allowances for tastes and projects other than our own. — James Arthur

If poems very different from my own bring pleasure to a group of readers, who am I to say that the poems should have been written differently? — James Arthur

My ideal reader is somebody who reads my poems out loud. — James Arthur

Memorizing the work of others definitely made me a better writer. — James Arthur

Years ago I used to set my alarm for 4 am, so that I could wake up in the middle of a dream and move directly into writing. I guess my favorite poems contain a mixture of intuitive and analytical thought. — James Arthur

If art doesn't require an audience, can an intimate conversation be a work of art? Can a thought be a work of art? Maybe. I don't know. These questions are completely hypothetical for me, because I love interacting with audiences. I want my poems to be heard. — James Arthur

When I'm most deeply involved in my writing, sometimes I do dream about poetry, and occasionally I wake up from a dream with a phrase that I like well enough to put it in a poem. — James Arthur

I often write from memory by walking around and talking to myself. Even when I'm working at a computer I write out loud, so that I can hear the poem's rhythm. — James Arthur

Maybe because I can't even put together an IKEA desk, I've never been tempted to think of my own poems as built objects - but I do sometimes imagine them as mathematical constructs. — James Arthur

And treating poetry as a performing art emphasizes its ephemerality. A printed poem can be endlessly reprinted, photocopied, scanned, uploaded, cut and pasted - but a performance, even if somebody's there with a video camera, is one time only: the audience experiences something that won't exist when the performance is over, and which won't ever be reproduced in exactly the same form. I find that appealing. — James Arthur

When you recite you're giving a performance, in the way that an actor or a singer performs, and some poets are not interested in doing that, maybe because they're writing for a readership as opposed to an audience, or because they see poetry as a very private art. — James Arthur

Could I be your hero, or your villain? I guess it just depends in whose eyes — James Arthur

It makes sense to me that the polyglot wouldn't know what language he dreamed in. — James Arthur

It's not realistic to imagine that any poem will last forever. Our species won't last forever! We try to capture and preserve our impressions of reality because it's all going away: everything we think and remember, everything we've ever felt, everyone we love. — James Arthur

I like poems that immediately claim my attention, instead of taking my attention for granted. At first read, I want to feel compelled to pick up the poem again; I want to be curious about its byways and secret corners. — James Arthur

Our analytical faculties allow us to look critically at our writing and interpret it. Sometimes we make bold, impulsive edits to our poems, but most forms of precision and economy in poetry, it seems to me, are signatures of the analytical mind. — James Arthur

I don't see why a poem couldn't be spoken out a car window or written on the beach at low tide. In fact, I'm sure people are doing it. — James Arthur