Poem Quotes

"The pleasure that I take in writing gets me interested in writing a poem. It's not a statement about what I think anybody else should be doing. For me, it's an interesting tension between interior and exterior"

Marilyn Hacker, Poet

"I don't know whether a poem has be there to help to develop something. I think it's there for itself, for what the reader finds in it"

Marilyn Hacker, Poet

"The experiment of the poem is mostly intuitive. I write the first draft, pulling in the various elements that interest me, in the hope that their being combined will lead to some kind of insight"

John Barton, Poet

"I would not say I chose to write long poems on a conscious level. The long poem has been a relative constant"

John Barton, Poet

"I consider a poem to be a kind of experiment where a number of elements are brought together under test conditions to see how they will interact to create meaning or relevance"

John Barton, Poet

"An experienced reader uses the poem as an agent of inquiry. This makes poetry very exciting, unstable, and interactive"

John Barton, Poet

"Critics? How do they happen? I know how it happened to me. I would send a poem or story to a magazine and they would say this doesn't suit our needs precisely but on the other hand you sound interesting. Would you be interested in doing a review?"

Leslie Fiedler, Critic

"I think I'm a very good reader of poetry, but obviously, like everybody, I have a set of criteria for reading poems, and I'm not shy about presenting them, so if people ask for my critical response to a poem, I tell them what works and why, and what doesn't work and why"

Diane Wakoski, Poet

"To declaim freedom verses seems like a poem within a poem; freedom requires guns, it requires arms, but no feet"

Franz Grillparzer, Poet

"I don't think there's anything wrong with someone having to read a poem twice. Or even a book"

George Murray, Poet

"I am still interested in the long or serial poem, but have written a few smaller things. I may start sending to journals again in a year or so... that's about it"

George Murray, Poet

"The paintings may communicate even better because people are lazy and they can look at a painting with less effort than they can read a poem"

Lawrence Ferlinghetti, Poet

"The poem, for me, is simply the first sound realized in the modality of being"

Charles Olson, Poet

"A revolutionary poem will not tell you who or when to kill, what and when to burn, or even how to theorize. It reminds you... where and when and how you are living and might live, it is a wick of desire"

Adrienne Rich, Poet

"I did that Grammys thing - I did a little freeform poem"

Beck, Musician

"I find purer philosophy in a Poem than in a Conclusion of Geometry, a chemical analysis, or a physical law"

Wilfred Owen, Soldier

"A Poem does not grow by jerks. As trees in Spring produce a new ring of tissue, so does every poet put forth a fresh outlay of stuff at the same season"

Wilfred Owen, Soldier

"I try not to observe myself in the process of composing a poem because I don't want to come up with a formula, which I would then be unscrupulous in using"

Thom Gunn, Poet

"I deliberately wrote a poem in my last book where I was suggesting that there are other passions as great as or more important than the passion of sex"

Thom Gunn, Poet

"Ginsberg's Collected Poems contains a wonderful poem about making it with Neal Cassady"

Thom Gunn, Poet

"Whether you listen to a piece of music, or a poem, or look at a picture or a jug, or a piece of sculpture, what matters about it is not what it has in common with others of its kind, but what is singularly its own"

Basil Bunting, Poet

"For what is a poem but a hazardous attempt at self-understanding: it is the deepest part of autobiography"

Robert Penn Warren, Novelist

"A writer's work often reflects what he or she has been exposed to in life; experiences which are the groundwork of a poem or a story"

Eyvind Johnson, Author

"For many years, I thought a poem was a whisper overheard, not an aria heard"

Rita Dove, Poet

"A poem conveys not a message so much as the provenance of a message, an advent of sense"

Thomas Harrison

"The dance is a poem of which each movement is a word"

Mata Hari, Dancer

"The poem is a little myth of man's capacity of making life meaningful. And in the end, the poem is not a thing we see-it is, rather, a light by which we may see-and what we see is life"

Robert Penn Warren, Novelist

"Just as a new scientific discovery manifests something that was already latent in the order of nature, and at the same time is logically related to the total structure of the existing science, so the new poem manifests something that was already latent in the order of words"

Northrop Frye, Critic

"The fact that The Bridge contains folk lore and other material suitable to the epic form need not therefore prove its failure as a long lyric poem, with interrelated sections"

Hart Crane, Poet

"I think that there are fiction writers for whom that works well. I could never do it. I feel as if, by the time I see that it's a poem, it's almost written in my head somewhere"

Sharon Olds, Poet

"There is something about a bureaucrat that does not like a poem"

Gore Vidal, Novelist

"No other human being, no woman, no poem or music, book or painting can replace alcohol in its power to give man the illusion of real creation"

Marguerite Duras, Novelist

"Usually a life turned into a poem is misrepresented"

Mark Strand, Poet

"Only truthful hands write true poems. I cannot see any basic difference between a handshake and a poem"

Paul Celan, Poet

"A poem records emotions and moods that lie beyond normal language, that can only be patched together and hinted at metaphorically"

Diane Ackerman, Poet

"However, if a poem can be reduced to a prose sentence, there can't be much to it"

James Schuyler, Poet

"The poem is sad because it wants to be yours, and cannot be"

John Ashbery, Poet

"Wanted: a needle swift enough to sew this poem into a blanket"

Charles Simic, Poet

"Mausoleum air and anguished pauses: If this production were a poem, it would be mostly white space"

Richard Corliss, Writer

"A poem can have an impact, but you can't expect an audience to understand all the nuances"

Douglas Dunn, Poet

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