Thinking Of You Poems Quotes & Sayings

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

We think we owe everyone something. We think we need to explain ourselves and we think too much about thinking too much.
And it is funny how we think we know it all, but the reality is this: everything we think that brings us together is everything that sets us further apart. And over thinking of how different we all are; is failing to recognize of how connected we all could really be. — Robert M. Drake

Keats's odes are among my favorite poems ever. As are Neruda's. So yes, I think my poems are odes, though I really just see those titles as ways of more or less orienting the poem. I've never thought about this until now, but I guess you could say that one effect of all the titles, their pervasiveness in the book, might be to once again, as so many other things do, put into question the meaning of the word "for," which I suppose is one of the great human questions: what is all this for? Why, and for whom, are we doing whatever we are doing? — Matthew Zapruder

Letter to Myself, in Remission, from Myself, Terminal"

You'll come to hate your own poems,
read them as pretty wisps of colorful thinking,
all those images just a splash of colored oil
sloshed over a pool gone rancid. Admit it.
Atheists always scared you. And no wonder.
Those nights you switched on the fan so no one
could hear you scream into your pillow, weeping
and biting your own hands like a motherless
monkey,banded to a body that despised you,
a suit of coals with a jammed-shut zipper.
Instead of the truth, you took refuge in stories
and souls, wore the word survivor like a pink nimbus.
All the while, my dear, I waited, knowing
you'd catch up to me one day. I'm holding the black-
backed mirror to your face. Look into it. — Anya Krugovoy Silver

She was resilient
A brave soldier when life tested her
It didn't matter that she did strange things
like stand tall under the rain
letting the drops kiss her skin
thinking the storm was romantic
It was hard to quiet her
not that you would want to
when she spoke, it was captivating
Her heart was like a candle
warm and delicate
just what you needed during darkness
Sometimes, she'd go off and explore the world
test her limits
laugh too much
cry when humans were cruel
It wasn't hard to see why people envied her
You'd come to realize she was a lion
and she could not be tamed. — M.J. Abraham

Poems very seldom consist of poetry and nothing else; and pleasure can be derived also from their other ingredients. I am convinced that most readers, when they think they are admiring poetry, are deceived by inability to analyse their sensations, and that they are really admiring, not the poetry of the passage before them, but something else in it, which they like better than poetry. — A.E. Housman

Thinking of you is a poison I drink often. — Atticus Poetry

I never think of poetry or the poetry scene, only separate poems written by individuals. — Philip Larkin

I think it's better if you write poems that look like you. — Richard Hugo

I am pretty interested in hybrid forms. I love graphic novels and I think there should be more graphic poems in the world. — Matthea Harvey

I am interested in the movement of my own thoughts and in trying make the poems feel more accurate to experience, including the experience of thinking. — Rachel Zucker

When I edit the poems - and I do edit, which some people don't mean when they use the term "stream of consciousness" - I'm usually editing toward greater accuracy, which sometimes means more fragmentation, because that is the way I think. — Rachel Zucker

Sadly, as with so much about history's heroes, it's the spotting of potential fame that's the difficulty, whether it's publishing their poems, hanging their paintings, or buying their old underwear. Think of the great men whose lives passed in penury and hacking coughs due to public unawareness that their littlest possession would end up at Sothebys or the basement at Fort Knox. — Alan Coren

When you think of things that influenced your life, Mother Goose influenced more people than almost any other thing, the rhythms of those poems. Everything after that was a bare imitation of some of those mysterious and materialistic poems. — Grace Paley

People have explored these questions ['Why am I here?', 'What is life about?'] in poems, not that they found their answers, but in reading [poems], I think, you find a certain beauty in the questioning, and that is then poetry. — Gwee Li Sui

I finally understood that I didn't lack pen and paper but my own
memorizing mind. It had been given away with a hundred poems, called
rote learning, old-fashioned, backward, an enemy of creative thinking,
a great human gift disowned. — Grace Paley

I'm more than a little suspicious of humor in poems, because I think it can at times be a way of getting a reaction out of a reader, or an audience, that is something closer to relief: i.e., thank god this isn't poetry, but stand-up comedy. Some poets are really funny, but more often poets are fourth rate stand up comics at best. But they benefit from the sheer relief of the audience. — Matthew Zapruder

The Fourth Sign of The Zodiac (Part 3) by Mary Oliver

I know, you never intended to be in this world.
But you're in it all the same.

So why not get started immediately.

I mean, belonging to it.
There is so much to admire, to weep over.

And to write music or poems about.

Bless the feet that take you to and fro.
Bless the eyes and the listening ears.
Bless the tongue, the marvel of taste.
Bless touching.

You could live a hundred years, it's happened.
Or not.
I am speaking from the fortunate platform
of many years,
none of which, I think, I ever wasted.
Do you need a prod?
Do you need a little darkness to get you going?
Let me be as urgent as a knife, then,
and remind you of Keats,
so single of purpose and thinking, for a while,
he had a lifetime.
Mary oliver — Mary Oliver

I prefer poems that occupy an imaginative sphere. When I lived in Cincinnati, I was occasionally referred to as an "Ohio Poet;" this made me uneasy, not only because I think of myself as a generally American poet but also because I like to think I write out of the country of my own mind. — Cate Marvin

I don't want people to write programmatic environmental poems, but I think sustainability should become deeply a part of the consciousness of poetry - an impulse toward compassion, empathy, and social justice. — Alison Hawthorne Deming

For better or worse, I tend to do a lot of thinking in my poems. But lately I've been trying to pay more attention to when and where I do that thinking, to be attentive to the settings in which meditation takes place. Sometimes the disconnect between the mind and the world is itself revealing, but in 'The Whole World Is Gone,' I think the setting deeply complements, indeed elicits and allows, a certain set of realizations to occur. — Jennifer Grotz

Like all my poems, 'Negotiations' has several sources. It deals with aging lovers and the often silent deals they make. Thinking about bargains made me think of The Little Mermaid and that made me remember something I had just read about the incredibly complex process by which tadpoles (actual little mermaids) are somehow able to reabsorb their tails and fashion their future frog legs. — Rae Armantrout

I want to understand the piers of language and music and comprehension that can hold up a building even when what the building houses is an earthquake. This thinking must surely come into the poems I write, but more by osmosis than will. — Jane Hirshfield

I worked with John Maybury on The Jacket and I think he's an extraordinary film-maker. I read the first drafts of this piece when I was working on The Jacket, and we'd so fallen in love with him that we thought he was the only person that should direct this! We wrote poems for him, we sent him champagne and cakes. Four years later he finally read it. — Keira Knightley

It is perfectly legitimate to write novels which are essentially prose poems, but in the end, I think, a novel is like a car, and if you buy a car and grow flowers in it, you're forgetting that the car is designed to take you somewhere else. — Robert Harris

Somewhere back a whiskey or so ago I wrote that thinking was a real thing in the world, just like anything else. I mean that very literally, materially. And it's true about poems, too. — Matthew Zapruder

Even though we've written epic poems and made incredible films about love, I still don't think anyone can understand what it is, or why it means everything. — Yvonne Adhiambo Owuor

I thought leaving you would be easy,
just walking out the door
but I keep getting pinned against it
with my legs around your waist and it's like
my lips want you like my lungs want air,
it's just what they where born to do so
I am sitting at work thinking of you
cutting vegetables in my kitchen
your hair in my shower drain
your fingers on my spine in the morning
while we listen to Muddy Waters, I know
you will never be the one I call home
but the way you talk about poems
like marxists talk of revolution
it makes me want to keep trying.
I'm still looking for reasons to love you.
I'm still looking for proof you love me. — Clementine Von Radics

I would say there are different kinds of poems. There are things that poets in the history of poetry hit upon when they're very young that can never be outdone and it's a remarkable, strange experience when you think of say Arthur Rimbaud who write poetry between the ages of 17 and 21 whose career was over by the time he was 22. — Edward Hirsch

Even if a poem is beautiful and memorable, it's not like an advertising jingle or propaganda, which attempt to convince and control. Poems seek to confuse, disabuse, enlarge understanding, and make people ask questions and think for themselves. — Rachel Zucker

I think I've been writing black poems all along, wearing my white mask. I'm always the victim ... but no longer! — Anne Sexton

I have lain awake in the darkness many nights
Thinking of poems, going to sleep on poems,
Finally,with the darkness closing on
The bright remembered words. I have thought of the darkness
Closing on the world, the words of the poems forgotten,
All the great beautiful words of the poems
Fading from the mind of the world, let go
Slowly, unknowingly, as from the mind
Of one diseased the light of man's endeavor
Fades to the idiot darkness and is lost.
Part of the darkness, I have lain awake
Watching the poems of the world fade out like stars. — Charles E. Butler

One way of emphasizing the singularity of the recent past is [..] to observe that the total number of humans ever to have lived is estimated at around (a bit less than) 100 billion. One of Walt Whitman's poems has a memorable image - thinking of all past people lined up in orderly columns behind those living - 'row upon row rise the phantoms behind us'. Actually, looking over our shoulder, we would see only around 15 rows. — Robert M. May

I think all poems are commissioned. They just come to me without somebody outside commissioning them. The idea comes and I will live with them 'til I get it as close to what I mean. I've never been totally satisfied. I've come close a few times. — Maya Angelou

Of course there is matter for remark in poems. Nobody denies that. But it must be solemnly laid on everybody in this world to make his own observations and remarks. That's what we mean by thinking, and that's about all we mean. A teacher says to a pupil "Watch me notice a few things in the next few months: let's see you notice a few things too." — Robert Frost

That kind of thinking [that writers must alleviate their guilt for leading a creative life] is based on the idea that the creative life is somehow self-indulgent. Artists and writers have to understand and live the truth that what we are doing is nourishing the world. William Carlos Williams said, "It is difficult to get the news from poems yet men die miserably every day for lack of what is found there." You can't eat a book, right, but books have saved my life more often than sandwiches. And they've saved your life ... But we don't say, oh, Maya Angelou should have silenced herself because other people have other destinies. It's interesting, because artists are always encouraged to feel guilty about their work. Why? Why don't we ask predatory bankers how they alleviate their guilt? — Ariel Gore

I always think [W.S.] Merwin's poems will last of anyone writing today. If I had to bet on posterity I would bet Merwin. My poems could easily evaporate. So I don't know. If you find yourself as a writer thinking about posterity you should probably go out for a brisk walk or something. — Billy Collins

I think you can perform any poem. But what I believe is that the best examples of spoken word poetry I've ever seen, are spoken word poems that, when you see them, you're aware of the fact they need to be performed. That there's something about that poem that you would not be able to understand if you were just reading it on a piece of paper. — Sarah Kay

Part of the reason that these attempts at explanation fail, I think, is that photographers, like all artists, choose their medium because it allows them the most fully truthful expression of their vision ... as Robert Frost told a person who asked him what one of his poems meant, 'You want me to say it worse?' — Robert Adams

Teaching English is (as professorial jobs go) unusually labor-intensive and draining. To do it well, you have to spend a lot of time coaching students individually on their writing and thinking. Strangely enough, I still had a lot of energy for this student-oriented part of the job. Rather, it was _books_ that no longer interested me, drama and fiction in particular. It was as though a priest, in midcareer, had come to doubt the reality of transubstantiation. I could still engage with poems and expository prose, but most fiction seemed the product of extremities I no longer wished to visit. So many years of Zen training had reiterated, 'Don't get lost in the drama of life,' and here I had to stand around in a classroom defending Oedipus. — Mary Rose O'Reilley

I just think that the world of workshops - I've written a poem that is a parody of workshop talk, I've written a poem that is a kind of parody of a garrulous poet at a poetry reading who spends an inordinate amount of time explaining the poem before reading it, I've written a number of satirical poems about other poets. — Billy Collins

I just know from experience that reading a funny poem aloud, especially at the beginning of a public reading, can have a certain effect. Somehow narrowing the spectrum of possible emotional reactions. So while I like it when people laugh at my poems, and I definitely enjoy being funny in them, I don't really think that's the most important thing that's going on, at least not to me. — Matthew Zapruder

I write poems from dreams pretty frequently. It's limiting to think the poem has to come from a sensical lyric "I" stating things clearly or dramatically. This whole course is trying to say there are millions of ways to approach writing a poem. — Matthea Harvey

It's a big thing to call yourself a poet. All I can say is that I have always written poems. I don't think I'm interested in any discussion about whether I'm a good poet, a bad poet or a great poet. But I am sure, I want to write great poems. I think every poet should want that. — Clive James

I don't want to write poems that are just really clear about how I'm aware of all the traps involved in writing poetry; I don't want to write fiction that's about the irresponsibility of writing fiction and I've thrown out a lot of writing that I think was ultimately tainted by that kind of self-awareness. — Ben Lerner

There's a line in The Barretts of Wimpole Street - you know, the play - where Elizabeth Barrett is trying to work out the meaning of one of Robert Browning's poems, and she shows it to him, and he reads it and he tells her when he wrote that poem, only God and Robert Browning knew what it meant, and now only God knows. And that's how I feel about studying English. Who knows what the writer was thinking, and why should it matter? I'd rather just read for enjoyment. — Susanna Kearsley

Everyone's taste is different. But I think the best way to defend against regrets after opening night is to try your best to tell the story you want to tell. In terms of smaller changes over time, I think good plays are like poems. Every syllable counts. — Stephen Karam

Young writers should be encouraged to write, and discouraged from thinking they are writers. If they arrive at college with literary ambitions, they should be told that everything they have done since their first childhood poems, printed in the school paper, has been preparation for entering a long, long apprenticeship. — Wallace Stegner

If I were to die thinking that I'd written three poems that people might read after me, I would feel that I hadn't lived in vain. Great poets might expect the whole body of their work, but most of us - well, I would settle for a handful. — Andrew Motion

I think of my best poems as vessels that I can or hope to fill with everything I have. — Alex Lemon

MAN is a slave only to his own mental lethargy. — Mina Loy

Poems, novels - these things belong to the nation, to the culture and the people. They've been stolen from the people and now the stolen things are being returned to their owners, but I don't think their owners should be grateful to receive them. — Joseph Brodsky

On the way back, Dennis, who has been unusually quiet this lunchtime, speaks up. 'I've been thinking about that Robert Frost poem,' he says. 'I don't think it's about making choices at all.'
'What's it about, so?' Geoff says.
'Anal sex,' Dennis says.
'Anal sex?'
'How'd'you figure, Dennis?'
'Well, once you see it, it's pretty obvious. Just look at what he says. He's in a wood, right? He sees two roads in front of him. He takes the one less travelled. What else could it be about? — Paul Murray

With lines that show an unyielding dedication to craft, these poems are not afraid of meaning or the meaningful. More and more every day, the thinking American asks how she is to believe in love when there is war all about her, and in each of her deeply felt lyrics, Elyse Fenton confronts this question with the kind of tenderness one lover reserves for another. If every poem is indeed a love poem,Clamor is indeed a debut worth reading and about which we must make noise. — Jericho Brown

My poems, I think, exist in a state of tension between the love of natural beauty and the fear of natural meaninglessness or absurdity. — Hayden Carruth

In America they have to know just what you are
novelist, poet, playwright ... Well, I've been all of them ... I think poems and novels and stories spring from the same seed. It's not like, say, playing polo and knitting. — Robert Penn Warren

I think we defy entropy and impermanence with our films and our poems. We hold onto each other a little harder and say, 'I will not let go. I do not accept the ephemeral nature of this moment. I'm going to extend it ... forever. Or at least I'm going to try.' — Jason Silva

I've made two short films, both of which my father deemed "interesting but beside the point," and am so paralyzed as a writer that I've started translating poems from languages I don't speak, some kind of Surrealist exercise meant to inspire me but also prevent me from thinking the perverse, looping thoughts that come unbidden: I am hideous. — Lena Dunham

I was thinking about the act of asking real questions in poems as a kind of spiritual practice. I ask questions relatively often in poems and I ask them because I don't know the answer. And I ask them because I think that poems are fantastic spaces with which to arrive at real conundrum-y kinds of questions, to go as far down the road as you can of understanding something and then sometimes that road ends with a real question. So — Krista Tippett

I think if you put something in a file that says "war poems" or "love poems" that you already restrict the way in which the poem might move. — Rita Dove

First tweet, best tweet, I always think. I try not to work them too much or else they get Pie Dough Disease, which is where the dough has been to too much college and doesn't understand that it is dough anymore and refuses to be shaped. Pie Dough Disease! Poems get that too. — Patricia Lockwood

Immensity is always there, but we so often become numb to it, or deceive ourselves into thinking our own lives and selves are what's large. Step into the ocean or walk on Mount Tamalpais, and that kind of amnesia and self-centeredness isn't possible. Enter the natural world at all, you see existence emerge, ripen, fall and continue, and you can't help but feel more tender towards self and others. That summoning into the large and the shared is what poems exist also to do. — Jane Hirshfield

A tattered copy of Johnson's large Dictionary was a great delight to me, on account of the specimens of English versifications which I found in the Introduction. I learned them as if they were so many poems. I used to keep this old volume close to my pillow; and I amused myself when I awoke in the morning by reciting its jingling contrasts of iambic and trochaic and dactylic metre, and thinking what a charming occupation it must be to "make up" verses. — Lucy Larcom

I got to thinking that poems were like people. Some people you got right off the bat. Some people you just didn't get
and never would get. — Benjamin Alire Saenz

I sat in a box
With walls on each side.
Not too tall.
Not too wide.
To think.
To ponder.
To pray.
To hide.
I sat in a box and cried. — Richelle E. Goodrich

But her beauty and stillness broke the balance in me. In my small apartment, she kissed me, and the ground opened up, swallowed me, buried me right there in that moment. How many awful poems did I write thinking of her? I know now what she was to me - the first glimpse of a space-bridge, a wormhole, a galactic portal off this bound and blind planet. She had seen other worlds, and she held the lineage of other worlds, spectacularly, in the vessel of her black body. — Ta-Nehisi Coates

I want you to judge me without thinking about it.
I want you to give me advice without considering my opinion.
I want you to expecting anything without the need to trust me.
I want you to decide for me with all the care in the world.
I want you to help me without smothering me.
I want you to decide without seeing my point of view.
I want you to hug me without holding me...
I want you to feel protected in my presence without me having to lie.
I want you to be close without suffocating me.
I want you to know everything without knowing anything...
I want you to know that both love and friendship should always be Unconditional. — Stefan Dimov

Usually the poems are written in one sitting. There's always a groping towards some satisfying ending. But I'd say the hardest part is not writing. Once the writing starts, it's too pleasurable to think of it as a difficulty. — Billy Collins

You should be spreading the good word. You should be etching the good word onto the glass scanning beds of library photocopiers. You should be scraping the truth onto old auto parts and throwing them off bridges so that people digging in the mud in a million years will question the world, too. You should be carving eyeballs into tire treads and onto shoe soles so that your every trail speaks of thinking and faith and belief. You should be designing molecules that crystallize into poems of devotion. You should be making bar codes that print out truth, not lies. You shouldn't even throw away a piece of litter unless it has the truth stamped on it
a demand for people to reach a finer place!
... Your new life will be tinged with urgency, as though you're digging out the victims of an avalanche. If you're not spending every waking moment of your life living the truth, if you're not plotting every moment to boil the carcass of the old order, then you're wasting your day. — Douglas Coupland

As a university student, I tried hard to write poems in Korean. It was at that time that I foresaw my death and the world's death. I think my poems started at that time. — Kim Hyesoon

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

I am furious at all the letters to answer, when all I want to do is think and write poems ... I long for open time, with no obligations except toward the inner world and what is going on there. — May Sarton