"I didn't think about whether I was writing poems. I was thinking. And the more I was thinking, the more there was I didn't understand."

Poems, Thinking, Writing

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"I didn't think about whether I was writing poems. I was thinking. And the more I was thinking, the more there was I didn't understand."

Exlpore more Poems quotes

"I would not say I chose to write long poems on a conscious level. The long poem has been a relative constant."

John Barton, Canadian Poet

Poems,

"Almost anything is too much. I am trying in my poems to have the reader be the experiencer. I do not want to be there. It is not even a walk we take together."

Mary Oliver, American Poet

Poems, Trying, Want

"Why does one always ask a writer why they stopped? I am sure everyone finds in any drawer a few dear poems."

Peter Bichsel, Swiss Writer

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"I was writing notes, but not composing poems. The Hunter began to develop out of this fragmented process."

George Murray, Canadian Poet

Poems, Writing

"I sometimes like to tinker with poems that have failed, ones that I have sent aside. Even years afterward, I will revisit them if there is something about them that I cannot give up on."

John Barton, Canadian Poet

Poems, Will, Years

"The title of the poems was The Only Bar in Dixon. We sent it out to The New Yorker on a fluke, and they took them and printed all three in the same issue."

James Welch, American Author

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"I would like to be proud of having written some poems that will be remembered, but I will never know whether I will have any reason to be proud of that."

Peter Davison, British Actor

Poems, Reason, Will

"I like poems you can tack all over with a hammer and there are no hollow places."

John Ashbery, American Poet

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"I like Beethoven, especially the poems."

Ringo Starr, English Musician

Poems,

"By reason of weird translation, many such sets of instructions read like poems anyhow."

Brian Ferneyhough, British Composer

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Explore more quotes by David Antin

"My mother turned into a professional widow. She couldn't understand why I wanted to be an engineer; she thought I should be a chicken farmer."

Family

"I wanted to be an inventor, whatever I thought that meant then. I guess I was thinking of Edison or maybe James Watt. Or maybe even Newton."

Thought

"I learned enough Hebrew to stagger through a meaningless ceremony that I scarcely remember."

Hebrew

"From this entertainment industry, may the gods of language protect us."

God

"My rejection of the idea of entertainment in its current form is based on the audience that comes with it."

Creativity

"I'm standing up thinking. Anybody who wants to listen is welcome. If not, I'm happy to see them go."

Thinking

"There are editing procedures for talks just as there are editing procedures in jazz improvisation."

Editing

"While I've had a great distaste for what's usually called song in modern poetry or for what's usually called music, I really don't think of speech as so far from song."

Poetry

"I can manage a prose format as long as I keep closer to Laurence Sterne than to Henry James."

Prose

"The Sophists' paradoxical talk pieces and their public debates were entertainment in 5th century Greece. And in that world, Socrates was an entertainer."

Sophists