Organizing your writing life

TAGGED FOR THE QUOTE MEME: Both Nick and Helen tagged me for a meme on finding 10 quotes from poets that jive with my philosophy on writing. I accepted that challenge and here's what I came up with:

I discovered metaphorical thinking on my own. I knew that in my mind dishes ran away with spoons, and pretty much all other ways of using words were more boring and less true.
-- Stan Rice

The day I became a poet was a sunny day of no particular ominousness. I was walking across the football field, not because I was sports-minded or had plans to smoke a cigarette behind the field house – the only other reason for going there – but because this was my normal way home from school. I was scuttling along in my usual furtive way, suspecting no ill, when a large invisible thumb descended from the sky and pressed down on the top of my head. A poem formed. It was quite a gloomy poem: the poems of the young usually are. It was a gift, this poem – a gift from an anonymous donor, and, as such, both exciting and sinister at the same time. I suspect this is the way all poets begin writing poetry, only they don’t want to admit it, so they make up more rational explanations. But this is the true explanation, and I defy anyone to disprove it. -- Margaret Atwood (pictured)

Writing saved me from the sin and inconvenience of violence. -- Alice Walker

When I’m reading a poem--let’s say Gwendolyn Brooks, or Seamus Heaney--I’m not looking for ideas so much as desiring to experience, in the imagination, a life, an image of a life. -- Sharon Olds

Sometimes, we write in order to get to a safer place in our heads. We can do that not only for ourselves, but for other people. -- Patricia Smith

The poem always leads me. Like a good dance partner I feel for the slight pressure at the small of the back, a shifting of weight. I move where the poem wants me to move. But that’s after the poem has actually asked me to dance. -- Dorianne Laux

The moment of change is the only poem. -- Adrienne Rich

The blood jet is poetry and there is no stopping it. -- Sylvia Plath

Devoting an evening trying to write something meaningful is probably a better way to spend one's time than watching Law & Order reruns. -- Ted Kooser

Put your ear down close to your soul and listen hard. -- Anne Sexton

I'm tagging Dustin, Lisa and Cherryl! And also please visit the VRZHU Press blog where I have a new essay, Finding Poetry in Film.