I feel like I am in the service of the poem. The poem isn’t something I make. The poem is something I serve. – Jane Hirshfield
When you finish a poem, it clicks shut like the top of a jewel box, but prose is endless. I haven’t experienced an awful lot of clicking shut! – Kenneth Koch
I do not usually revise much, though I often cut, particularly the end or toward the end of a poem. – James Schuyler
My secret dream is to write an epic poem. That’s probably the most pretentious thing I’ve said. – Laurie Anderson
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
A poem begins as a lump in the throat, a sense of wrong, a homesickness, a lovesickness. – Robert Frost
For what is a poem but a hazardous attempt at self-understanding: it is the deepest part of autobiography. – Robert Penn Warren
Mausoleum air and anguished pauses: If this production were a poem, it would be mostly white space. – Richard Corliss
All poems say the same thing, and each poem is unique. Each part reproduces the others, and each part is different. – Octavio Paz
Poems are not read: they are reread. Reread the poem, then read between the lines, then look at it, then watch it, then peek at it: handle it like an object. Contemplate its shadows, angles and dimensions. – Terrance Hayes
If I wrote in a sonnet form, I would be distorting. Or if I had some great new idea for line breaks and I used it in a poem, but it’s really not right for that poem, but I wanted it, that would be distorting. – Sharon Olds
I don’t think anybody is a poet 24/7, only in those rare moments when a person is producing a poem. – X. J. Kennedy
This creature of the poem may assemble itself into a being with its own centrifugal force. – Sharon Olds
Most students of literature can pick apart a metaphor or spot an ethnic stereotype, but not many of them can say things like: ‘The poem’s sardonic tone is curiously at odds with its plodding syntax.’ – Terry Eagleton
