124 Quotes by James Arthur

Maybe because I can’t even put together an IKEA desk, I’ve never been tempted to think of my own poems as built objects – but I do sometimes imagine them as mathematical constructs.

My dad, a mathematician, raised me to believe that mathematics is beautiful, so math is a part of my imaginative terrain. In my late 20s I wrote several 11-line poems because I wanted to create poems that couldn’t be uniformly divided into couplets, tercets, or quatrains, 11 being a prime number.

When I’m most deeply involved in my writing, sometimes I do dream about poetry, and occasionally I wake up from a dream with a phrase that I like well enough to put it in a poem.

Could I be your hero, or your villain? I guess it just depends in whose eyes.

I don’t see why a poem couldn’t be spoken out a car window or written on the beach at low tide. In fact, I’m sure people are doing it.

I like poems that immediately claim my attention, instead of taking my attention for granted. At first read, I want to feel compelled to pick up the poem again; I want to be curious about its byways and secret corners.

I like poems that affect me emotionally and also provoke me to further, deeper thought. I enjoy challenge, but not, I think, for its own sake.

Our analytical faculties allow us to look critically at our writing and interpret it. Sometimes we make bold, impulsive edits to our poems, but most forms of precision and economy in poetry, it seems to me, are signatures of the analytical mind.

I don’t think I’d ever get any better as a poet if I didn’t push myself, very deliberately, to grow. My best poems surprise me, as they should, but I fight them at every turn, possibly just because I’m stubborn.