Top 35 Pattiann Rogers Quotes (2025 Update)

1. “My object when writing prose is to write as clearly as possible. I think I know what I’m saying in prose, and I want others to understand it and to be able to restate it.”

— Pattiann Rogers

2. “We’re all vulnerable in our various ways, and what we are physically, our bodies, is what has developed with the goal of keeping that life safe and intact, at least until we have procreated. That’s what our bodies are, the protection of life.”

— Pattiann Rogers

3. “I like poetry because poetry – even in free verse – is formal, and it has to be very concise and packed and rich, and I like the feeling of having to do that, having to make the language tight and still free, as if the deepest freedom is created by the restrictions.”

— Pattiann Rogers

4. “People sometimes think that defining a term is pedantic and useless, but terms need to be defined if they’re going to be discussed, even if the terms are only defined for a single conversation. Those involved in the conversation need to know how the terms are being used.”

— Pattiann Rogers

5. “Poetry is very playful with language. I think all poetry, at its heart, is playful. It’s doing unusual and playful things with the language, stirring it up. And prose is not doing that. Primarily it’s not attempting to do that.”

— Pattiann Rogers

6. “Poetry uses language to create a music borne inside human experiences and emotions.”

— Pattiann Rogers

7. “As far as I can tell, writing the essays didn’t change the way I wrote poetry. Although the essays contain scattered passages that might be called lyrical, they often contain closed statements of what is only suggested in the poetry.”

— Pattiann Rogers

8. “Often when I write poetry I don’t quite know what I’m saying myself. I mean, I can’t restate the poem. The meaning of the poem is the poem.”

— Pattiann Rogers

9. “I do love writing prose interspersed with the poetry of other people. Their rhythms break into my prose and create a connection.”

— Pattiann Rogers

10. “When the music created by the sounds and ordering of the words matches the thrust of the meanings of the words, then a radiant state of awareness can occur.”

— Pattiann Rogers

11. “I approach writing a poem in a much different state than when I am writing prose. It’s almost as if I were working in a different language when I’m writing poetry. The words – what they are and what they can become – the possibilities of the words are vastly expanded for me when I’m writing a poem.”

— Pattiann Rogers

12. “I’ve spent much of my life being attuned to watching for an image or a phrase that can trigger what might be a poem – could become a poem.”

— Pattiann Rogers

13. “I don’t write or think too much about the word “salvation.” I might; I probably should. We are such needy creatures, needing to be saved, to feel we are saved or might be, however we define ourselves, however we define that word.”

— Pattiann Rogers

14. “What triggers a poem for me is not the same as what triggers an essay. My mind is geared to looking for, or to watching out for, the image that attracts my attention or the phrase or the strange juxtaposition that strikes me bodily, or an odd question or supposition.”

— Pattiann Rogers

15. “For me, prose is never a poem. Because with prose there are so very few tools to create the music. And one of the most important tools missing is the ability to create silences, as you can in poetry by how you fashion the lines and breaks within the lines and stanzas.”

— Pattiann Rogers

16. “Poetry doesn’t function by saying things straightforwardly because the language is too imprecise, too limited often, to address the underlying subject of most poems.”

— Pattiann Rogers

17. “The poem is a process, a way for me to discover questions, to ask them clearly or to discover the results of certain suppositions. Suppositions are a form of questioning.”

— Pattiann Rogers

18. “I think my prose – mine and that of others – sometimes slips into a cadence or rhythm that can replicate or come close to the music in a wonderful poem, and then it returns to the sound of prose.”

— Pattiann Rogers

19. “To my mind, most prose poems are more prose than poetry. They don’t possess most of the qualities of a poem.”

— Pattiann Rogers

20. “I love the language. I’m just totally fascinated by the sound and the look of words and the kinds of cadences you can create with them, the various kinds of music.”

— Pattiann Rogers

21. “Often I’m struck by something that I read; then I go and research it a little more, especially if I begin a poem, and I find out that I need to know more. Then I usually get intrigued and excited about whatever it is I’m writing about.”

— Pattiann Rogers

22. “I think parts of my soul have been saved by my writing, not in the sense of escaping death, but escaping the death of the moment, perhaps.”

— Pattiann Rogers

23. “The silences express so much and are so crucial in music, and prose does not allow for the creation of these silences, these white spaces on the page or the computer screen.”

— Pattiann Rogers

24. “I’d rather call prose poems something else, for clarity – something like “poetic prose,” prose that contains a quality of poetry, but not poems.”

— Pattiann Rogers

25. “I see my poems as interlinked. No poem gives an answer. It may offer other questions, it may instigate other questions that then become poems.”

— Pattiann Rogers

26. “One of the most important differences I see between prose and poetry is the music of the language.”

— Pattiann Rogers

27. “Poetry is so close to music, not just in cadence and sound but in silences. That’s why, to me, I can’t talk about prose poems. I can talk about poetic prose.”

— Pattiann Rogers

28. “In poetry I can let the language go, allow an image that seems out of place to enter and see what happens, always listening to the music that’s being created, just like the world around us, never predictable, always shifting and intertwining, reflecting and echoing itself.”

— Pattiann Rogers

29. “The greatest tragedy that can befall a poet is to be praised by being misunderstood.”

— Pattiann Rogers

30. “It sounds old-fashioned to say, but we have some kind of purpose for being here, not poets or writers, but all of us humans.”

— Pattiann Rogers

31. “I think the language of science is highly lyrical and evocative and an important part of our lives in many ways.”

— Pattiann Rogers

32. “If I’m excited by something bodily, and curious about it, I generally want to delve into it and explore it with poetry. That’s the way I ordinarily watch the world around me.”

— Pattiann Rogers

33. “Sometimes, as in an athletic event where everything clicks, inexplicable things do happen. Learning and practicing an art or a skill has always been part of the success of the goal.”

— Pattiann Rogers

34. “Ordering is very important with essays, even if a reader doesn’t read the essays or the poems in order through the book.”

— Pattiann Rogers

35. “I have thought for many years that the audience any creative writer imagines has a great effect on what gets written.”

— Pattiann Rogers

36. “A poetic list is a talent in itself. You can write a list of things, and it can be boring.”

— Pattiann Rogers

37. “I’m all in favor of poets telling about the process as much as they can. And many do.”

— Pattiann Rogers