James Arthur Quotes

Quotes about:

• Start listening to what you say. Are your comments and ideas negative? You aren't going become positive if you always say negative things. Do you hear yourself say"I could never do that","I never have any luck","I never get things right". Wow - that's negative self-talk! Try saying"I am going to do that","I am so lucky""I always try to get things right". Can you hear how much better that sounds?

  James Arthur

  Inspiring, Self, Ideas

  49 Copy quote

• Memorizing the work of others definitely made me a better writer.

  James Arthur

  Made, Memorizing

  "Poetry As a Way of Thinking: An Interview with James Arthur". Interview with Emilia Phillips, www.32poems.com.

  5 Copy quote

• If poems very different from my own bring pleasure to a group of readers, who am I to say that the poems should have been written differently?

  James Arthur

  Should Have, Groups, Different

  "Poetry As a Way of Thinking: An Interview with James Arthur". Interview with Emilia Phillips, www.32poems.com.

  9 Copy quote

• For me, poetry is a way of thinking, and like many poets, I'm driven by the idea of trying to find the impossible, perfect words: the words that will hold my subject.

  James Arthur

  Thinking, Ideas, Perfect

  "Poetry As a Way of Thinking: An Interview with James Arthur". Interview with Emilia Phillips, www.32poems.com.

  8 Copy quote

• My ideal reader is somebody who reads my poems out loud.

  James Arthur

  Loud, Reader, Ideals

  "Poetry As a Way of Thinking: An Interview with James Arthur". Interview with Emilia Phillips, www.32poems.com.

  4 Copy quote

• I try not to think in terms of what poems or poets should do. Most of us appreciate a wide diversity in music, in cooking, in movies, but in our own medium, poetry, we often fail to make allowances for tastes and projects other than our own.

  James Arthur

  Thinking, Appreciate, Diversity

  "Poetry As a Way of Thinking: An Interview with James Arthur". Interview with Emilia Phillips, www.32poems.com.

  4 Copy quote

• It makes sense to me that the polyglot wouldn't know what language he dreamed in.

  James Arthur

  Language, Polyglots, Make Sense

  "Poetry As a Way of Thinking: An Interview with James Arthur". Interview with Emilia Phillips, www.32poems.com.

  4 Copy quote

• As a species, we create tools to control our environment. What excites my imagination is wilderness: our materials' ability to escape our control.

  James Arthur

  Imagination, Tools, Environment

  "Poetry As a Way of Thinking: An Interview with James Arthur". Interview with Emilia Phillips, www.32poems.com.

  5 Copy quote

• Poetry isn't an efficient tool for preserving experience, any more than it's an efficient mode of communication, but who says that it should be efficient?

  James Arthur

  Communication, Tools, Should

  "Poetry As a Way of Thinking: An Interview with James Arthur". Interview with Emilia Phillips, www.32poems.com.

  5 Copy quote

• I believe strongly in what John Keats called negative capability: the trait or practice that allows a poet to remain in uncertainties, mysteries, doubts, without any irritable reaching after fact & reason. For Keats, William Shakespeare exemplified negative capability, and I do think it's extraordinary that for all the thousands of pages Shakespeare left behind, we really don't know much about Shakespeare's own personality or opinions.

  James Arthur

  Believe, Thinking, Personality

  Source: www.guernicamag.com

  4 Copy quote

• I often write from memory by walking around and talking to myself. Even when I'm working at a computer I write out loud, so that I can hear the poem's rhythm.

  James Arthur

  Memories, Writing, Talking

  "Poetry As a Way of Thinking: An Interview with James Arthur". Interview with Emilia Phillips, www.32poems.com.

  4 Copy quote

• It's not realistic to imagine that any poem will last forever. Our species won't last forever! We try to capture and preserve our impressions of reality because it's all going away: everything we think and remember, everything we've ever felt, everyone we love.

  James Arthur

  Reality, Thinking, Remembers Everything

  "Poetry As a Way of Thinking: An Interview with James Arthur". Interview with Emilia Phillips, www.32poems.com.

  4 Copy quote

• In my case, performance is part of the medium. Sometimes I feel that it's my main medium, and that the presentation of my poems on the page is secondary.

  James Arthur

  Pages, Sometimes, Cases

  "Poetry As a Way of Thinking: An Interview with James Arthur". Interview with Emilia Phillips, www.32poems.com.

  4 Copy quote

• 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.

  James Arthur

  Thinking, Challenges, Sake

  "Poetry As a Way of Thinking: An Interview with James Arthur". Interview with Emilia Phillips, www.32poems.com.

  4 Copy quote

• I do own CDs by Neil Young, Leonard Cohen, and Joni Mitchell, but I don't think of them as being major influences on my writing.

  James Arthur

  Writing, Thinking, Influence

  Source: www.guernicamag.com

  4 Copy quote

• It's true, there aren't many explicit references to Canada in my book. And not many explicit references to the U.S., either. I try to fill my poems with enough real, observed detail that the poems create a believable world - but I don't write poems for the sake of telling my own story. My life is not important or interesting enough to warrant that kind of documentary. Instead I try to use my experience as a way of understanding situations that are common to many people. I want readers to project their own lives onto my poems.

  James Arthur

  Real, Book, Writing

  Source: www.guernicamag.com

  4 Copy quote

• 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.

  James Arthur

  Writing, Mind, Signatures

  Source: www.32poems.com

  5 Copy quote

• When you recite you're giving a performance, in the way that an actor or a singer performs, and some poets are not interested in doing that, maybe because they're writing for a readership as opposed to an audience, or because they see poetry as a very private art.

  James Arthur

  Art, Writing, Giving

  "Poetry As a Way of Thinking: An Interview with James Arthur". Interview with Emilia Phillips, www.32poems.com.

  5 Copy quote

• I can't read my poem "Distracted by an Ergonomic Bicycle" without thinking of Seattle, where the events of the poem took place, and I can't read "In Defense of the Semicolon" without thinking of Toronto - but why should that matter to anyone else? If another reader imagines "In Defense of the Semicolon" taking place in New Orleans, great.

  James Arthur

  Thinking, Imagine, Distracted

  Source: www.guernicamag.com

  4 Copy quote

• I don't think I did write any poems to fill narrative gaps. Not consciously, anyway. As much as possible, I try to discover my poems' subject matter through the act of writing, instead of deciding ahead of time what my poems will be about.

  James Arthur

  Writing, Thinking, Trying

  Source: www.guernicamag.com

  4 Copy quote

• I wrote the poems in Charms Against Lightning one by one, over almost a decade, and I did not write them toward any theme or narrative. But once I really got serious about putting together a book, I began to see that in fact there were themes across the poems, if only because my own obsessions had brought me back time and again to the same ground. I realized that any ordering of the poems would determine how those themes developed over the manuscript, and how the collection's dramatic conflicts were resolved.

  James Arthur

  Book, Writing, Together

  Source: www.guernicamag.com

  4 Copy quote

• William Shakespeare tried hard to see every facet of every question, probably because he was more interested in questions than in answers. That's a big part of what makes him great, in my opinion.

  James Arthur

  Opinion

  Source: www.guernicamag.com

  4 Copy quote

• Whenever I visit my family in Canada, I remind myself that what many Americans would consider forthright, many Canadians would consider overbearing.

  James Arthur

  My Family

  Source: www.guernicamag.com

  4 Copy quote

• I'm a mix; I'm sure some of my Canadian friends find me very American, both in person and on the page.

  James Arthur

  Find Me

  Source: www.guernicamag.com

  4 Copy quote

• I do like Canadian poetry. Christian Bök, Anne Carson, Carmine Starnino, and Don McKay are a few of the Canadian poets whose work has been important to me. But I'm not sure that I do see poetry as a world apart. Some of my metaphors are based in the fantastic, but I try to be true to life as I understand it. That understanding is affected by my Canadianness, my Americanness, my whiteness, my gender, my age, my education, my experience...everything about me affects my view of reality. But I try to wrestle against those partialities, not embrace them.

  James Arthur

  Christian, Reality, True Life

  Source: www.guernicamag.com

  6 Copy quote

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