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The principles of poetry I express are not intended as rules to be followed but as propositions to be discussed. It is also important to understand that they have been developed a posteriori, not a priori.
Poetry, if it speaks validly, speaks from, and to, that part of us which makes each of us a unique individual human being, which is the same part of us that makes each of us identical with every other human being. This is the part of us which some call the unconscious, and some call the soul.
A bad poem says, “This is who I am.” A good poem says, “This is who you are.”
We should not consider poetry as an alternative to thinking; we should consider poetry as a way of thinking.
The speaker of a poem, if it is an effective poem, is a third self shared by the poet and the reader.
Aristotle said that poetry is imitation, and that what an imitator imitates is an action. This is the most important single thing that has ever been said about poetry, and the most important single thing for the writer or reader of poetry to understand.
A poem is as much written by the reader when it is read as it is written by the writer when it is written.
What a poem means is not what it says, but how it says it.
A poet should resist the irresistible temptation to preach.
Trying to make a poem successful by having it express important moral truths is cheating and, what’s worse, won’t work.
All American poetry is a dialog between Emily Dickinson and Walt Whitman.
Politicians tell truths that let them get away with telling lies. Poets tell lies that let them get away with telling the truth.
Any poem involves three people: 1) the person who wrote it, 2) the person who speaks it, and 3) the person who reads it. To confuse the first person with the second person is to guarantee the poem won’t be successful, which is why so few successful poems are being written today. The poet’s goal instead should be to bring the second and third persons as close together as possible.
Bad poets use feelings to generate words; good poets use words to generate feelings.
A poem is, or should be, an answer to the essay exam question: “Is life worth living? Give reasons for your answer.”
For the poet, to say “I” is not to take off a mask, but to put one on.
I only read a poem if its first line gives me a tingle.
If a poem puzzles you, you are beginning to understand it.
To a poet, the most gratifying response a reader can make to one of the poet’s poems is, “How did you know?”
In our society, if you tell someone you are a sculptor, or a film maker, or a composer, they are likely to ask about your work. If you tell someone you are a poet, they are likely to back away from you in barely suppressed panic, as if they were afraid you might pull out a poem and read it to them.
A successful poem is not an expression of emotion, it is a creating of emotion.
If you are writing a poem, you are, or should be, writing a play. All poetry is, by the fundamental nature of poetry, dramatic poetry.
If you would speak truly, first learn to hate your own voice.
There is nothing wrong with someone who has no musical talent, training, or ability sitting at a piano banging away at it at random and calling the sounds produced self-expression, but there is a very great deal wrong with a group of people gathered around to admire it as music. This is the state of poetry in our time.
The poet’s proper function is to invoke the gods.
Never pay poetry reading or contest fees. If asked why, say, “I don’t pay for love and I don’t pay for readers.”
If you make boring cliches rhyme, they are still boring cliches.
A poem should be considered the script of a role in a play which the reader is auditioning for.
I’m not interested in poems that try to make me understand the person who wrote them; I want poems that make me understand myself.
It’s a good idea for a poet to read a lot of poetry, preferably in more than one language, making no effort either to concentrate on or to avoid the poetry of any particular country or century, including your own: just read what you like. Then when you write a poem, assume your reader has read, understood, and liked all the same poetry that you have read, understood, and liked. That this isn’t true doesn’t matter.
The worst mistake a poet can make is to try to be one of the acknowledged legislators of this world.
The only thing Creative Writing programs are really useful for is showing you how not to write.
A good poem is addressed to the person who reads it, not to the person who writes it. By this standard, there are practically no good poems being written today.
“What is this poem about?” is always the wrong question.
Just because your emotions are as good as anyone else’s doesn’t mean your poetry is going to be as good as anyone else’s.
My poems are not attempts to express myself; they are attempts to express you.
Poetry is the opposite of politics, since politics is about how we are different, but poetry is about how we are the same.
Never use AI to compose or revise anything.
Poems by which a poet tries to show the reader what type of person the poet is are not worth much as poetry. To be valuable as poetry, a poem should be something by which the poet shows the reader what type of person the reader is.
It takes a lot skill, thought, and hard work to make a poem sound convincingly spontaneous.
Poems, if they are successful ones, are lies that tell the truth.
Poetry should express emotion with structure and restraint, because, paradoxically, structure can make the expression of emotion seem more, not less, spontaneous, and restraint can make emotional expression seem more, not less, intense.
Poets cannot make the laws, but they can make the laws that make the laws.
Every poem is a love poem.
Never begin a poem with the word “We.” You might as well begin it, “Here is the sort of thing I learned to write in that creative writing class.”
Read your poem aloud to someone who isn’t into poetry. Can they tell it’s poetry and not prose? If not, you haven’t written a poem.
“Instagram Poet” : Literature : : “Shower Singer” : Music
There is no point in writing poems that are good: they need to be astonishing.
When you read a good poem aloud, you can taste it on your lips.
Anyone who thinks that what a poem says is what the poet is saying doesn’t know the first thing about poetry.
To be a poet is to hopefully ask passing strangers if they are looking for a good time.
A confessional poem will never be a successful one because it ignores Emily Dickinson’s directive: “Tell all the truth but tell it slant.”
A poet shouldn’t worry too much about being consistent. As Walt Whitman said, “Do I contradict myself? So sue me.” (I may not have that quote exactly right, but he was from New York so he could have said it that way.)
To call someone who expects poetry to be skilled and serious art a “poetry snob” is like calling someone who doesn’t want to live on Whoppers™ and Slurpee's™ a “food snob.”
It is as absurd and futile to try to explain the meaning of a poem by constructing a prose paraphrase of it as it would be to use the same method to try to explain the meaning of a painting, dance, or musical performance.
Forget about poetry readings. They’ve degenerated into nothing but group therapy sessions that don’t cure anyone.
A poem which ultimately says, one way or another, “Where’s mine?” will always be a bad poem. A good poem will always ultimately say, one way or another, “Here’s yours.”
If you want to be a poet, get a good education. Then get the hell out of the university, and don’t hang around with literary types.
Who is more ambitious: someone whose ambition is to be a billionaire, or someone whose ambition is to be a great poet? Consider: in 1820 Wordsworth, Coleridge, Blake, Byron, Keats, and Shelley were all alive and writing poetry. In 1820 who was the richest person in England? Who knows? Who cares?
That which we cannot speak of, we must sing.