Share
×
Inspirational Quotes
Authors
Professions
Topics
Tags
Quote
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
Share
Change background
T
T
T
Change font
Original
TAGS & TOPICS
Pattiann Rogers
Age: 84
Born: 1940
Born: March 23
Poet
Writer
Joplin
Missouri
Poetry
Underlying
Saying
Address
Language
Addresses
Often
Poems
Doesn
Limited
Things
Subject
Function
Straightforwardly
Subjects
Imprecise
More quotes by Pattiann Rogers
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
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
One of the most important differences I see between prose and poetry is the music of the language.
Pattiann Rogers
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
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
I do love writing prose interspersed with the poetry of other people. Their rhythms break into my prose and create a connection.
Pattiann Rogers
I'm all in favor of poets telling about the process as much as they can. And many do.
Pattiann Rogers
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
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
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
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
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
I have thought for many years that the audience any creative writer imagines has a great effect on what gets written.
Pattiann Rogers
The greatest tragedy that can befall a poet is to be praised by being misunderstood.
Pattiann Rogers
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
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
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
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
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
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
