Each poem in becoming generates the laws by which it is generated: extensions of the laws to other poems never completely take. – A. R. Ammons
Attempts to put my poems to music have had disastrous results in all cases. And the poem, if it’s written with the ear, already has been set to its own verbal music as it was composed. – Billy Collins
‘Finally’ actually started out as a poem. I always wrote poetry, and pretty soon I figured out that if I could write poems, I could write songs. – CeCe Peniston
The idea of a poem as a message in a bottle means that it’s sent out towards some future reader, and the reader who opens that bottle becomes the addressee of the literary text. – Edward Hirsch
It hardly seems worthwhile to point out the shortsightedness of those practitioners who would have us believe that the form of the poem is merely its shape. – Mark Strand
The composition of a single melody is born out of a bit of text, perhaps the first line, but it can also be the entire strophe; it can even be the poem’s overall form. – Dietrich Fischer-Dieskau
There’s something about the shape that a poem takes in my mind before I write it that has to do with suddenness. – Dana Goodyear
As I remember, the first real poem I wrote was about the wheat fields between Spokane and Pullman, to the south. – Carolyn Kizer
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
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
When I have worries, fears or a love affair, I have the luck of being able to transform it into a poem. – Mario Benedetti
An experienced reader uses the poem as an agent of inquiry. This makes poetry very exciting, unstable, and interactive. – John Barton
Strictly speaking, the idea of a scientific poem is probably as nonsensical as that of a poetic science. – Karl Wilhelm Friedrich Schlegel
The reader’s challenge is to replicate the experiment by reading the poem and to draw their own conclusions. – John Barton
Considered subjectively, philosophy always begins in the middle, like an epic poem. – Karl Wilhelm Friedrich Schlegel
