Robert Bly Quotes

All emotions are the ore from which poetry may be sifted.

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

Poems are always interested in what Ivan Illich called 'shadow work,' not least because that is no small part of their own way of working.

Whereas if you were writing an op-ed piece or an essay, somebody would be asking, "What's your point?" With poetry you can stay in a moment for as long as you want. Poetry is about metaphor, about a thing standing in for something else. It's the thing that opens out to something else. What that something else is changes for readers. So what's on the page - it falls away.

There's more substance in my prose and my poetry than in all my films together. Writing is a more direct way of expressing yourself because, in cinema, you always have finances, organization, actors, technical apparatus and all that stuff coming in between.

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

I would keep in mind to a young poet that you are entering into something that is very important, that has always been important in terms of human concerns.

For poetry the idea is everything; the rest is a world of illusion.

Poetry - poiesis means a thing made.

Prose is walking; poetry is flying

The business of the poet is not to find new emotions, but to use the ordinary ones and, in working them up into poetry, to express feelings which are not in actual emotions at all.

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

I spent many years of my life as an economist and demographer. I was finally distracted by writing my novels and poetry. I'm enormously happy that was the case. I feel that with writing I have found my metier.

Because people are very interested in my poetry, in what I say.

I've always written, all my life, and when I was very young I developed an interest in poetry.

I always knew that was what I wanted to do - to write, particularly poetry.

I've written poetry most of my life.

I write poems for myself and I write poetry that gets torn apart and becomes songs. I have a lot of respect for words, the power of words.

I always see nice images like that but I don't know what to do with them. I guess you share them with someone. Or you write them down in a poem. I had so many of those little images, but I never shared them or wrote any of them down.

I want to write because I have the urge to excel in one medium of translation and expression of life. I can't be satisfied with the colossal job of merely living. Oh, no, I must order life in sonnets and sestinas and provide a verbal reflector for my 60-watt lighted head.

Like a piece of ice on a hot stove the poem must ride on its own melting.

It's their skins I'm peeling," she said. "The skins of the insipid scribblers, which I graft to the page, creating monsters of meaninglessness.

Take my verses too serious ya hate me, cause I'm the one to paint a vivid picture, no HD.

To me Art (poetry) is a continuous and continuing process and that when a man fails to write good poetry he fails to live fully or well.

I am writing these poems from inside a lion.