Quote

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

Change background

T
T
T

Change font

TAGS & TOPICS

Pattiann Rogers
Age: 84
Born: 1940
Born: March 23
Poet
Writer
Joplin
Missouri
Music
Mystery
Investigate
Better
Depends
Includes
Might
Poetry
Primarily
Different
Writer
Prose
Really
Cases
Worse
Way
Maybe
Guess
Language
Case
Power
Poet
Imaginatively

More quotes by Pattiann Rogers

Image
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
Image
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
Image
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
Image
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
Image
In poetry I can let the language go, allow an image that seems out of place to enter and see what happens, always listening to the music that's being created, just like the world around us, never predictable, always shifting and intertwining, reflecting and echoing itself.
Pattiann Rogers
Image
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
Image
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
Image
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
Image
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
Image
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
Image
The greatest tragedy that can befall a poet is to be praised by being misunderstood.
Pattiann Rogers
Image
To my mind, most prose poems are more prose than poetry. They don't possess most of the qualities of a poem.
Pattiann Rogers
Image
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
Image
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
Image
One of the most important differences I see between prose and poetry is the music of the language.
Pattiann Rogers
Image
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
Image
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
Image
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
Image
I'm all in favor of poets telling about the process as much as they can. And many do.
Pattiann Rogers
Image
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