Denise Duhamel
I believe it's impossible to write good poetry without reading. Reading poetry goes straight to my psyche and makes me want to write. I meet the muse in the poems of others and invite her to my poems. I see over and over again, in different ways, what is possible, how the perimeters of poetry are expanding and making way for new forms.Collection: Believe
I don't know if there are topics that I unconsciously avoid, but as soon as they pop up in my writing, I try to take on those topics, whether or not I publish the poems.Collection: Writing
Unlike Woody Allen, I would be happy to be part of any (poetry) club that would have me.Collection: Would Be
Over the years, I became more and more interested in the forms and techniques in which things could be said.Collection: Years
Not that a poem can "hurt" someone the same way a physical blow can or even a mean remark can...I just felt unsure that my tone would be taken the right way and/or unsure of my own writing, that I couldn't maintain the tone I wanted.Collection: Hurt
As a teenager, I loved acting, painting, photography, and making films with my friend's Super 8 camera. But I always loved writing the best. I chose writing even before I knew poetry was available to me.Collection: Photography
My advice to my younger self would have been, "Chill. Concentrate on the poems. Everything else will work itself out."Collection: Self
After my marriage ended, I had an urge to skip that part of my life completely in terms of poetry, not publish anything at all about it.Collection: Term
Writing is performative - and while, yes, the words in essence will be there "forever," poems are often about ecstatic moments rather than trying to pin down a particular truth of an event.Collection: Writing
The "truth" is the poem itself. Just because someone writes a poem about a feeling she has does not mean that the feeling will stay forever. The truth of the emotion of the poem remains, even if the particular truth of the poet changes.Collection: Writing
While poetry was less professionalized than it is now, I still had this urge to win prizes and see my work in magazines, to get an "A," as though poetry could be graded. I wish I had been more patient and less frantic about getting published.Collection: Winning
I love going to movie theaters, even in the era of movies on-demand and Netflix. When you are in a movie theater, no one can reach you by phone or other means.Collection: Mean
I have no idea, actually, where I fit in, in terms of poetry camps. At AWP conferences, I have been on panels about humor, collaboration, visual poetry, confessional poetry, gender, and the body, as well as tributes to Edward Field and Albert Goldbarth. I felt at home on all of them - most poets straddle more than one school.Collection: Home
If you are my friend and say to me, "Please don't write about this," I won't.Collection: Writing
The spoken word community was significant in making me want to write accessible and urgent poems. Bob Holman, in particular, was an impressive figure.Collection: Writing
Jean Valentine and Jane Cooper were my professors at Sarah Lawrence College - and they were uncompromised in their art. They gave me models of how to live one's life as a poet.Collection: Art
Though it does seem like I have written an immense amount of work, over the years I have pushed the pause button. I have poems that I haven't sent out for publication, mostly based on political/social issues.Collection: Years
I had no idea, when I was writing early on, that my poems would be published or read by anyone, never mind people I knew or would meet. I just wrote urgently - naïvely, I suppose, looking back.Collection: Writing
I still write what I need to write - but I can't deny that something has changed when I think about sending work out. Maybe it's just growing older and feeling more responsible to the world.Collection: Writing
I started wanting desperately to say something, to make a point, to be heard - and I still feel that way. Free verse served me best when I embarked on poetry.Collection: Way
I am open to squeezing in whatever I can in this wonderful life. Instead of asking, "Is that all there is?" I seem, lately, to be always saying, "Wow!"Collection: Asking
What has stayed true in my life as a writer is my dedication to writing - I try to write every day, no matter what - and the joy that writing has given me.Collection: Writing
I know writers for whom the act of writing is a necessary chore. They suffer to write great work. I am very lucky that for me writing is a delight.Collection: Writing
I always wanted to be some kind of writer - I wrote plays and songs and "books" before I realized living and breathing people still wrote poems.Collection: Song
I also could see myself as a stand-up comedian, a fashion designer (for people of all sizes), a hairdresser, an earnest and eventually burnt-out politician, or the owner of a small bistro. But I fear that, without poetry, I would have simply been going through the motions.Collection: Fashion
The "biggest" poems I ever made are based on the psychological principal of the "Johari Window:" what the self freely shares with others; what the self hides from others; what others hide from the self; and what is unknown to the self and others.Collection: Self
I am interested in the confines of the page and busting through/off the page as well. A writer must let go of the line when writing prose poems, which brings its own pleasures.Collection: Letting Go
I began to think about the extent to which nude and semi-nude female bodies are commonplace in our present day culture and how young girls might be affected. I wondered if, at some point, this bombardment of images could possibly get boring and that concealing - rather than revealing - would awaken sexual desire. I don't think that will ever be the case, of course, but I was intrigued to write a poem in which dressing was just as erotic as undressing.Collection: Girl
Visual media is the dominant art form in our present day culture, whereas poetry is, at best, a proxy. Yet poetry and film are both "dream factories."Collection: Dream
In almost every book I've written, there is a reference to a movie - legendary films, actors and actresses, and forgotten made-for-TV movies. The leaps poems make are not unlike the cuts in a film. The miniature and avant-garde prose poets have perhaps the most obvious ties to film, as a prose poem in its shape is not unlike a movie screen.Collection: Book
In addition to writing in received forms, I have also had fun making up forms - Möbius strips and visual poems, particularly.Collection: Fun