Joseph Joubert Quotes

After I'd produced about two dozen pen and ink drawings, one evening I decided that they needed poems to accompany them. I still have no idea where that notion came from, but it took me about two hours to produce verses for these creatures.

A poet's work consists less in seeking words for his ideas than in seeking ideas for his words and predominant rhythms.

Poetry is what happens when an anxiety meets a technique.

I feel often very close to the ecstasy and anguish which lie at the very heart of poetry - I am writing a lot.

I write lyrics everyday as I go. I'm always taking notes in my phone whenever I am inspired by something. Most of my writing starts out as poetry before I put it into songs.

What has any poet to trust more than the feel of the thing? Theory concerns him only until he picks up his pen, and it begins to concern him again as soon as he lays it down.

At each moment, a poem might grow into a totally different shape. It is not so much like working in a garden. It is more as if you remade the garden every day.

There must of course be a relationship between translating and making poems of your own, but what it is I just don't know.

Art is that which comes to a man, and stands between himself and an implacable witness: the work.

I do not go in search of poetry. I wait for poetry to visit me.

If a poet is anybody, he is somebody to whom things made matter very little - somebody who is obsessed by Making.

But I think that's a particular kind of experience involving a certain immediacy between you and the canvass, you and the particular kind of experience of that particular moment.

Speaking for myself, art differs from writing in that I never know what I'm going to paint until I paint it, so it's almost like automatic writing. A writer, on the other hand, can't help but know what he's going to write, because the activity demands a degree of premeditation.

When we make records, it's hard to pinpoint one thing that inspires a record. It's usually a number of different things that lead to inspiration or wanting to write something down and share it with someone.

How does one happen to write a poem: where does it come from? That is the question asked by the psychologists or the geneticists of poetry.

I guess I'm drawn to artists and literary people and want to learn about them.

I was very committed to the process of composing, working at poems, putting things together and taking them apart like some kind of experimental filmmaker.

The genesis of a poem for me is usually a cluster of words. The only good metaphor I can think of is a scientific one: dipping a thread into a supersaturated solution to induce crystal formation. I don't think I solve problems in my poetry; I think I uncover the problems.

Robert Frost had always said you mustn't think of the last line first, or it's only a fake poem, not a real one. I'm inclined to agree.

I do not see the process of blogging as a separate thing from creating art. This is in part why I do not like to be known for being a 'blogger,' as this is just one form of output for creative ideas.

How do poems grow? They grow out of your life.

I'm just a landscape painter. I look out the window and I see what's going on, and I paint it. While I'm painting it, I also write thoughts about what I see going on out there.

So the best way to understand poetry, which is made by men, is to imitate, and that goes back to making work as a kind of doorway into new work, as opposed to making work as a mirror of the old work.

For every artist, experience is never complete until it has been reproduced in creative work.

To cast aside from Poetry, all that is not Inspiration