Pattiann Rogers quotes:

What triggers a poem for me is not the same as what triggers an essay. My mind is geared 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.

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.

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.

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.

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?

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.

The greatest tragedy that can befall a poet is to be praised by being misunderstood.

I love the language. I'm just totally fascinated by the sound and the look of words and the kinds of cadences you can create with them, the various kinds of music.

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.

Sometimes, as in an athletic event where everything clicks, inexplicable things do happen. Learning and practicing an art or a skill has always been part of the success of the goal.

I'd rather call prose poems something else, for clarity - something like "poetic prose," prose that contains a quality of poetry, but not poems.

I'm all in favor of poets telling about the process as much as they can. And many do.

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.

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.

A poetic list is a talent in itself. You can write a list of things, and it can be boring.

For me, prose is never a poem. Because with prose there are so very few tools to create the music. And one of the most important tools missing is the ability to create silences, as you can in poetry by how you fashion the lines and breaks within the lines and stanzas.

I do love writing prose interspersed with the poetry of other people. Their rhythms break into my prose and create a connection.

I don't write or think too much about the word "salvation." I might; I probably should. We are such needy creatures, needing to be saved, to feel we are saved or might be, however we define ourselves, however we define that word.

I have thought for many years that the audience any creative writer imagines has a great effect on what gets written.

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.

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.

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.

I think the language of science is highly lyrical and evocative and an important part of our lives in many ways.

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.

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.

In I Praise My Destroyer, Diane Ackerman demonstrates once again her love for the specific language that rises from the juncture of self and the natural world, and her skillful use of that language. Whether she turns her attention to the act of eating an apricot 'the color of shame and dawn,' or to 'the omnipotence of light,' or to grief when 'All the greens of summer have blown apart,' her linking of unique images, her energetic wit and whimsy, her compassionate investment in life, always bring new pleasures and perceptions to the reader.

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.

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.

I've spent much of my life being attuned to watching for an image or a phrase that can trigger what might be a poem - could become a poem.

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.

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.

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.

One of the most important differences I see between prose and poetry is the music of the language.

Ordering is very important with essays, even if a reader doesn't read the essays or the poems in order through the book.

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.

Poetry uses language to create a music borne inside human experiences and emotions.

Straight up from this road Away from the fitted particles of frost Coating the hull of each chick pea, And the stiff archer bug making its way In the morning dark, toe hair by toe hair, Up the stem of the trillim, Straight up through the sky above this road right now, The galaxies of the Cygnus A cluster Are colliding with each other in a massive swarm Of interpenetrating and exploding catastrophes. I try to remember that.

The silences express so much and are so crucial in music, and prose does not allow for the creation of these silences, these white spaces on the page or the computer screen.

To my mind, most prose poems are more prose than poetry. They don't possess most of the qualities of a poem.

We're all vulnerable in our various ways, and what we are physically, our bodies, is what has developed with the goal of keeping that life safe and intact, at least until we have procreated. That's what our bodies are, the protection of life.

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.

How can I appreciate light from an aging

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.