Great Writing Quotes by Poet Elizabeth Bishop

It takes so many thousands of things coming together at the right moment just to make a poem that no one could ever really separate, and say this did this, that did that.

People say I am a perfectionist. The truth is that I often return to a poem started months or years before. I am very slow, that’s all.

Poetry has always seemed the most natural way of saying what I feel. I never intended to ‘be’ a poet, as I think people set out to do today. I never wanted to think about any label. It’s far more important to just keep writing poetry than to think of yourself as a poet whose job is to write poetry all the time. What do such people do during those long, infertile periods? Poetry should be as unconscious as possible.

Some poems begin as a set of words that you aren’t sure what they apply to, but eventually they accumulate and become lines, and then you see some pattern emerge. Sometimes an idea haunts me for a long time, though poems that start as ideas are much harder to write. It’s easier when they start out with a set of words that sound nice and don’t make much sense but eventually reveal their purpose. Again, the unconscious quality is very important. You don’t ask a poem what it means, you have to let it tell you.

One of the few good qualities I think I have as a poet is patience. I have endless patience. Sometimes I feel I should be angry at myself for being willing to wait 20 years for a poem to get finished, but I don’t think a good poet can afford to be in a rush.

I’m not trying to do anything specific in my poetry—only to please myself. The greatest challenge, for me, is to try and express difficult thoughts in plain language. I prize clarity and simplicity. I like to present complicated or mysterious ideas in the simplest ways possible. This is a discipline which many poets don’t see as important as I do. Complexity, I think, often obscures fuzzy thinking or verse masking as poetry. If poetry isn’t disciplined then probably the eye which observed or the mind which translated the experience lacked a certain discipline.

I am very object-struck. Critics have often written that I write more about things than people. This isn’t conscious on my part. I simply try to see things afresh. A certain curiosity about the world around is one of the most important things in life. It’s behind almost all poetry.

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My name is Rob Bignell. I’m an affordable, professional editor who runs Inventing Reality Editing Service, which meets the manuscript needs of writers both new and published. I also offer a variety of self-publishing services. During the past 15 years, I’ve helped more than 400 novelists and nonfiction authors obtain their publishing dreams at reasonable prices. I’m also the author of the Storytelling 101 writing guidebooks, four nonfiction hiking guidebook series, and the literary novel Windmill. Several of my short stories in the literary and science fiction genres also have been published.

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