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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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Pattiann Rogers
Age: 84
Born: 1940
Born: March 23
Poet
Writer
Joplin
Missouri
Writing
Object
Think
Objects
Thinking
Saying
Possible
Understand
Write
Restate
Others
Prose
Able
Clearly

More quotes by Pattiann Rogers

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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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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 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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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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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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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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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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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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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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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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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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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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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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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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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 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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The greatest tragedy that can befall a poet is to be praised by being misunderstood.
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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To my mind, most prose poems are more prose than poetry. They don't possess most of the qualities of a poem.
Pattiann Rogers