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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
Discover
Questions
Results
Asks
Suppositions
Process
Supposition
Form
Questioning
Certain
Poem
Way
Clearly

More quotes by 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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I approach writing a poem in a much different state than when I am writing prose. It's almost as if I were working in a different language when I'm writing poetry. The words - what they are and what they can become - the possibilities of the words are vastly expanded for me when I'm writing a poem.
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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To my mind, most prose poems are more prose than poetry. They don't possess most of the qualities of a poem.
Pattiann Rogers
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One of the most important differences I see between prose and poetry is the music of the language.
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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What triggers a poem for me is not the same as what triggers an essay. My mind is geared now to looking for, or to watching out for, the image that attracts my attention or the phrase or the strange juxtaposition that strikes me bodily, or an odd question or supposition.
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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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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I think my prose - mine and that of others - sometimes slips into a cadence or rhythm that can replicate or come close to the music in a wonderful poem, and then it returns to the sound of prose.
Pattiann Rogers
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I see my poems as interlinked. No poem gives an answer. It may offer other questions, it may instigate other questions that then become poems.
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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As far as I can tell, writing the essays didn't change the way I wrote poetry. Although the essays contain scattered passages that might be called lyrical, they often contain closed statements of what is only suggested in the poetry.
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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Often when I write poetry I don't quite know what I'm saying myself. I mean, I can't restate the poem. The meaning of the poem is the poem.
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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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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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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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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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