My favourite poem is the one that starts ‘Thirty days hath September’ because it actually tells you something. – Groucho Marx
No poem, not even Shakespeare or Milton or Chaucer, is ever strong enough to totally exclude every crucial precursor text or poem. – Harold Bloom
Mostly the thought and the verse come inseparably. In my poem Poetics, it’s as close as I come to telling how I do it. – Howard Nemerov
What we call a poem is mostly what is not there on the page. The strength of any poem is the poems that it has managed to exclude. – Harold Bloom
The only thing you can really say in a poem is what you really, really deeply believe. – Jonathan Galassi
What is it precisely, that feeling of ‘returning’ from a poem? Something is lighter, softer, larger – then it fades, but never completely. – Ian Mcewan
I’ve got a poem that’s in a lot of international anthologies called ‘After the Anonymous Swedish’ and I thought, ‘Well, I’m a Swede. I can make up a Swedish poem.’ It turned out pretty good. – Jim Harrison
One who writes a poem writes it because the language prompts, or simply dictates, the next line. – Joseph Brodsky
I used to stand on the corner in San Diego with poems sticking out of my hip pocket, asking people if there was a place where I could read poems. The audience is half of the poem. – Juan Felipe Herrera
A poem with grandly conceived and executed stanzas, such as one of Keats’s odes, should be like an enfilade of rooms in a palace: one proceeds, with eager anticipation, from room to room. – James Fenton
It’s a maddening thing in itself to look at an old poem of yours. To translate it is even more maddening. – Joseph Brodsky
I don’t see that a single line can constitute a stanza, although it can constitute a whole poem. – James Fenton
Do not wait for a poem; a poem is too fast for you. Do not wait for the poem; run with the poem and then write the poem. – Juan Felipe Herrera
What is the poem, after it is written? That is the question. Not where it came from or why. – Allen Tate
I always say that I’ll have a go and see whether the poem works and if it does, then fine. – Carol Ann Duffy
In a manner of speaking, the poem is its own knower, neither poet nor reader knowing anything that the poem says apart from the words of the poem. – Allen Tate
To a poet, it’s quite ruinous to have a poem distorted, out of shape, or squeezed, shall we say, into this tiny screen. But I’m not sure big digital companies are sensitive to the needs of poets. – Billy Collins
When I write a poem, I go into a state of self-forgetfulness, and something higher takes over; I like to call it my best self. – Ben Okri
But in a lot of ways my poems are very conventional, and it’s no big deal for me to write a poem in either free verse or strict form; modern poets can, and do, do both. – Andrew Motion
I write with a Uni-Ball Onyx Micropoint on nine-by-seven bound notebooks made by a Canadian company called Blueline. After I do a few drafts, I type up the poem on a Macintosh G3 and then send it out the door. – Billy Collins
Well, it’s a badge of honour for any self-respecting poet to be criticized by Auberon Waugh. But in a lot of ways my poems are very conventional, and it’s no big deal for me to write a poem in either free verse or strict form; modern poets can, and do, do both. – Andrew Motion
How does one happen to write a poem: where does it come from? That is the question asked by the psychologists or the geneticists of poetry. – Allen Tate
