Poem Quotes

"The reader's challenge is to replicate the experiment by reading the poem and to draw their own conclusions"

"Lyrics are very different. There is a clear line between that and a poem. Something that has been a source of great excitement and delight for me is this idea that I get to rhyme"

Joanna Newsom, Musician

"In a poem the excitement has to maintain itself. I am governed by the pull of the sentence as the pull of a fabric is governed by gravity"

Marianne Moore, Poet

"My sense of a poem - my notion of how you revise - is: you get yourself into a state where what you are intensely conscious of is not why you wrote it or how you wrote it, but what you wrote"

Philip Levine, Poet

"But most commonly, it's one poem that I work on with a lot of intensity"

Philip Levine, Poet

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

Charles Simic, Poet

"Rome was a poem pressed into service as a city"

Anatole Broyard, Critic

"If that voice that you created that is most alive in the poem isn't carried throughout the whole poem, then I destroy where it's not there, and I reconstruct it so that that voice is the dominant voice in the poem"

Philip Levine, Poet

"Back then, I couldn't have left a poem a year and gone back to it"

Philip Levine, Poet

"Peace goes into the making of a poem as flour goes into the making of bread"

Pablo Neruda, Writer

"Style is not something applied. It is something that permeates. It is of the nature of that in which it is found, whether the poem, the manner of a god, the bearing of a man. It is not a dress"

Wallace Stevens, Poet

"In working on a poem, I love to revise. Lots of younger poets don't enjoy this, but in the process of revision I discover things"

Rita Dove, Poet

"I keep the drafts of each poem in color-coded folders. I pick up the folders according to how I feel about that color that day"

Rita Dove, Poet

"I have a high guilt quotient. A poem can go through as many as 50 or 60 drafts. It can take from a day to two years-or longer"

Rita Dove, Poet

"Perhaps first and foremost is the challenge of taking what I find as a reader and making it into a poem that, primarily, has to be a plausible poem in English"

Marilyn Hacker, Poet

"I have experienced healing through other writers' poetry, but there's no way I can sit down to write in the hope a poem will have healing potential. If I do, I'll write a bad poem"

Marilyn Hacker, Poet

"Again like Williams, with the emphasis now regrettable, when a man makes a poem, makes it mind you, he takes the words as he finds them lying interrelated about him"

Robert Creeley, Poet

"If you read quickly to get through a poem to what it means, you have missed the body of the poem"

M. H. Abrams, Critic

"In my world, history comes down to language and art. No one cares much about what battles were fought, who won them and who lost them - unless there is a painting, a play, a song or a poem that speaks of the event"

Theodore Bikel, Actor

"The first poem I ever wrote, about loss, when I was 5 years old, expressed the themes of everything I would ever write"

Marguerite Young, Author

"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

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

Beck, Musician

"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

"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

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

Mata Hari, Dancer

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