Douglas Florian Quote: "With time some poems just fall by the wayside. ..."

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With time some poems just fall by the wayside. Other poems get better over time with revision, revision, revision. My ladybug poem took 10 minutes to write but was 10 years in the making.
Douglas Florian / Illustrator
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With time some poems just fall by the wayside. Other poems get better over time with revision, revision, revision. My ladybug poem took 10 minutes to write but was 10 years in the making.
⇛ Douglas Florian (Illustrator)

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Left right left right. We're army ants. We swarm we fight. We have no home. We roam. We race. You're lucky if we miss your place.

Douglas Florian Illustrator

The art has to have a life of its own and not merely illustrate. I've always felt a great illustration can make a good poem even better. That's the advantage I have in illustrating my own work - I have the freedom to leap far from the poem.

Douglas Florian Illustrator

I studied art at Queens College, taking very few courses in literature. But I've always loved reading poetry and grew up enjoying the so-called beat poets, Allan Ginsburg, Jack Kerouac, and Gregory Corso among them. The poems of Ogden Nash also inspired me, having first seen his work while browsing in a library when I was in the sixth grade.

Douglas Florian Illustrator

Narrative nonfiction was not my forte. I always wanted to let my imagination run free, and the facts sometimes got in the way. At one point I wanted to illustrate Jack Prelutsky's enchanting poems. Unable to do that, I started devising and improvising my own poems, very raw at first. I immersed myself in verse, writing reams of stuff until it gelled.

Douglas Florian Illustrator

A fall from the third floor hurts as much as a fall from the hundredth. If I have to fall, may it be from a high place.

Paulo Coelho Lyricist

Switch on the television or glance at the newspaper: You will see death everywhere. Yet, did the victims of those plane crashes and car accidents expect to die? They took life for granted, as we do. How often do we hear stories of people whom we know, or even friends, who died unexpectedly? We don't even have to be ill to die: Our bodies can suddenly break down and go out of order, just like our cars. We can be quite well one day, then fall sick and die the next.