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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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Pattiann Rogers
Age: 84
Born: 1940
Born: March 23
Poet
Writer
Joplin
Missouri
Quite
Often
Write
Mean
Restate
Writing
Poem
Meaning
Poetry
Saying
More quotes by 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
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
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
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
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
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
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
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
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
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 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
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
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
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
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
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 have thought for many years that the audience any creative writer imagines has a great effect on what gets written.
Pattiann Rogers
One of the most important differences I see between prose and poetry is the music of the language.
Pattiann Rogers
