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The poem is a process, a way for me to discover questions, to ask them clearly or to discover the results of certain suppositions. Suppositions are a form of questioning.

Pattiann Rogers

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Pattiann Rogers
Age: 84
Born: 1940
Born: March 23
Poet
Writer
Joplin
Missouri
Form
Questioning
Certain
Poem
Way
Clearly
Discover
Questions
Results
Asks
Suppositions
Process
Supposition

More quotes by Pattiann Rogers

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Poetry is very playful with language. I think all poetry, at its heart, is playful. It's doing unusual and playful things with the language, stirring it up. And prose is not doing that. Primarily it's not attempting to do that.
Pattiann Rogers
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A poetic list is a talent in itself. You can write a list of things, and it can be boring.
Pattiann Rogers
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Poetry doesn't function by saying things straightforwardly because the language is too imprecise, too limited often, to address the underlying subject of most poems.
Pattiann Rogers
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How can I appreciate light from an aging sun shining through new configurations neither pine nor ash? How can I extol the nuturing fragrances from the spires, the spicules of a landscape not yet formed or seeded?
Pattiann Rogers
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It sounds old-fashioned to say, but we have some kind of purpose for being here, not poets or writers, but all of us humans.
Pattiann Rogers
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I do love writing prose interspersed with the poetry of other people. Their rhythms break into my prose and create a connection.
Pattiann Rogers
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I like poetry because poetry - even in free verse - is formal, and it has to be very concise and packed and rich, and I like the feeling of having to do that, having to make the language tight and still free, as if the deepest freedom is created by the restrictions.
Pattiann Rogers
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Often I'm struck by something that I read then I go and research it a little more, especially if I begin a poem, and I find out that I need to know more. Then I usually get intrigued and excited about whatever it is I'm writing about.
Pattiann Rogers
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People sometimes think that defining a term is pedantic and useless, but terms need to be defined if they're going to be discussed, even if the terms are only defined for a single conversation. Those involved in the conversation need to know how the terms are being used.
Pattiann Rogers
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I have thought for many years that the audience any creative writer imagines has a great effect on what gets written.
Pattiann Rogers
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Poetry is so close to music, not just in cadence and sound but in silences. That's why, to me, I can't talk about prose poems. I can talk about poetic prose.
Pattiann Rogers
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If I'm excited by something bodily, and curious about it, I generally want to delve into it and explore it with poetry. That's the way I ordinarily watch the world around me.
Pattiann Rogers
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I'm primarily a poet, so I'd have to say in my case I'd investigate the mystery in poetry in a different way than prose might investigate it, in a way that includes the power of the music of language and maybe more imaginatively in poetry, but I don't really know about better or worse. I guess it depends on the writer.
Pattiann Rogers
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I'd rather call prose poems something else, for clarity - something like poetic prose, prose that contains a quality of poetry, but not poems.
Pattiann Rogers
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The greatest tragedy that can befall a poet is to be praised by being misunderstood.
Pattiann Rogers
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From the beginning I felt that I didn't ever want to leave the impression that the process of writing a poem is totally mysterious. I couldn't explain everything that went on in the creation of a poem, but I could try to explain as much as I knew. I thought readers deserved that. I didn't want to set myself apart as being someone special.
Pattiann Rogers
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I'm all in favor of poets telling about the process as much as they can. And many do.
Pattiann Rogers
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When the music created by the sounds and ordering of the words matches the thrust of the meanings of the words, then a radiant state of awareness can occur.
Pattiann Rogers
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My object when writing prose is to write as clearly as possible. I think I know what I'm saying in prose, and I want others to understand it and to be able to restate it.
Pattiann Rogers
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I think parts of my soul have been saved by my writing, not in the sense of escaping death, but escaping the death of the moment, perhaps.
Pattiann Rogers