“…I engage with poetry musically. I think I hear the music of the poem before I put words to it. The poem comes to me as it were a song more than a string of words or images. If I can’t transport that musical quality to the poem, then the poem doesn’t exist for me…”

—  Lucha Corpi

On how she favors a musical quality to her poetry in the book Truthtellers of the Times: Interviews with Contemporary Women Poets https://books.google.com/books?id=LkVO9mmfwZYC&pg=PA23&lpg=PA23&dq

Adopted from Wikiquote. Last update June 3, 2021. History

Help us to complete the source, original and additional information

Do you have more details about the quote "…I engage with poetry musically. I think I hear the music of the poem before I put words to it. The poem comes to me as…" by Lucha Corpi?
Lucha Corpi photo
Lucha Corpi 3
1945

Related quotes

“The meanings of poetry take their growth through the interaction of the images and the music of the poem.”

Muriel Rukeyser (1913–1980) poet and political activist

Source: The Life of Poetry (1949), p. 31
Context: The meanings of poetry take their growth through the interaction of the images and the music of the poem. The music is not the rhythm, which is a representation of life, alone. The music involves the interplay of the sounds of words, the length of the sequences, the keeping and breaking of rhythms, and the repetition and variation of syllables unrhymed and rhymed. It also involves the play of ideas and images.

Joan Miró photo

“I try to apply colors like words that shape poems, like notes that shape music.”

Joan Miró (1893–1983) Catalan painter, sculptor, and ceramicist

from: Joan Miro: Selected Writings and Interviews, M.Rowell, Thames and Hudson, 1987
1940 - 1960

John Millington Synge photo

“A translation is no translation, he said, unless it will give you the music of a poem along with the words of it.”

John Millington Synge (1871–1909) Irish playwright, poet, prose writer, and collector of folklore

The Aran Islands (1907)

Franz Grillparzer photo
Edgar Allan Poe photo
Robert Pinsky photo

“I am very interested in memorization which is the process of incorporating a poem, so, I would say the kind of poetry I write is the kind that emphasises the physical qualities of the words.”

Robert Pinsky (1940) American poet, editor, literary critic, academic.

WPFW-FM inteview with Grace Cavalieri 1995/96 season

Yevgeny Yevtushenko photo

“I was overjoyed when I read Yevtushenko's "Babi Yar"; the poem astounded me. It astounded thousands of people…People knew about Babi Yar before Yevtushenko's poem, but they were silent. And when they read the poem, the silence was broken. Art destroys silence.”

Yevgeny Yevtushenko (1932–2017) Russian poet, film director, teacher

Solomon Volkov (ed.), Testimony: The Memoirs of Dmitri Shostakovich (New York: Limelight, 2006) pp. 158-9.
Criticism

Jon Pineda photo

“Once I wrote poems, I found that I was able to piece together individual moments that would, I’d hoped, sometimes compound. The line was the most important thing to me—that and the music it produced.”

Jon Pineda (1971) American writer

On how poetry writing eventually led to short stories and other works in “A Poet’s Novel: Jon Pineda talks LET’S NO ONE GET HURT” https://www.booklistreader.com/2018/03/22/books-and-authors/a-poets-novel-jon-pineda-talks-lets-no-one-get-hurt/ in Booklist Reader (2018 Mar 22)

“I revise short poems sometimes for years, whereas, since there is no getting lost in the long poem, I engage whatever comes up in the moment and link it with its moment.”

A.R. Ammons (1926–2001) American poet

Paris Review interview (1996)
Context: In the long poem, if there is a single governing image at the center, then anything can fit around it, meanwhile allowing for a lot of fragmentation and discontinuity on the periphery. Short poems, for me, are coherences, single instances on the periphery of a nonspecified center. I revise short poems sometimes for years, whereas, since there is no getting lost in the long poem, I engage whatever comes up in the moment and link it with its moment.

Related topics