"There really is a thing called poetry and it should be precise and evocative."

"Writing a poem is like smashing diamonds into magic powder, or at least like smashing a bottle and then throwing the glass shards up in the air." (artist)

"Poetry doesn't have to acknowledge the passing of time.  The poem is an object on the page in many ways.  Line length is part of the form.  You can have a poem that just walks around in a timeless state as an object."

"I realized that if writing was going to take me away from my boys or my husband, then I wanted to find the joy and happiness in life and find ways to record that in my poems." 

"Even if you are a great poet, it doesn't mean the road is easy.  It's very hard and it might take a while to be recognized."

"Being a prose writer is like being a bricklayer and being a poet is like being a jewel cutter."

"I hope that whoever reads my work, no matter the subject matter, will be able to tell that this poet is so clearly in love with the animals and plants and mysteries of this planet and tried to do her very best to get you to feel the same way too." (camera owner)

"When you write a love poem, the happy love poem, readers might be thinking 'screw you, I don't care.'  When you write a love poem, there has to be the awareness of the fragility of life that you could lose this person at any moment, or this person could leave, or you could die.  You have to have some shadow to prop up the poem; otherwise, it becomes sentimental, and you don't want sentimentality.  You want sentiment but not sentimentality."

"Find Art.

Seize brush.  Take stance.  Do fancy footwork.  Dance.

Run race.  Try poem.  Write play."

"I also go out in the afternoons to shoot photographs.  I find that the process of training the eye to compose in the viewfinder helps me hone my ability to revise poems.   I've always loved the connections and cross-pollination between art forms."

"If I was writing about a crow feather, I wanted to make sure I got the shape exactly right, the right point and feel.  This began my incorporating research into my poetry, and to this day, I still do a lot of research to make sure I always portray the natural world correctly." (artist)

"I had the privilege of saying my body was healthy for crying out loud, and ... I should make the most of my time and marvel at all I could and just sit myself down at the desk.  And so I did."

"I hear what I write.  I started writing poetry when I was really young.  I always hear it in my head.  I realized that a lot of people who write about writing don't seem to hear it, don't listen to it, their perception is more theoretical and intellectual.  But if it's happening in your body, if you are hearing what you write, then you can listen for the right cadence, which will help the sentence run clear."

"Doing is being.

To have done's not enough;

To stuff yourself with doing—that's the game.

To name yourself each hour by what's done,

To tabulate your time at sunset's gun

And find yourself in acts

You could not know before the facts"

"I often start something and have no idea how it'll end.  The sense of surprise there, to me, is like magic every time." 

"The teaching of poetry has almost disappeared from the curricula of many English departments, and the AWP conferences have become a refuge for people who want to talk about poetry."

"With poetry in particular, I just feel like Mother Nature is the best creator of metaphor on the planet." (artist)

"There are poems you write that are so on the edge they could go either way, especially when you take a very big risk."

"What young writers always talk about—'finding your voice'—well, you can't find your own voice if you aren't listening for it.  The sound of your writing is an essential part of what it's doing.  Our teaching of writing tends to ignore it, except maybe in poetry.  And so we get prose that goes 'clunk, clunk, clunk.'  And we don't know what's wrong with it."

"The surprise of what you'll find after rendering an image and how different if often comes out is the exact same thing I love about writing poems."

"Language and song are mingled in human history. To speak, to sing, is our heritage. Poets know that poems are songs, but few of us realize that novels are too." (musician)

"We all write for ourselves, because we're all those kids who, when we were little, liked to write poems and short stories.  We amused ourselves."

"You say you don't understand Dylan Thomas?  Yes, but your ganglion does, and your secret wits, and all your unborn children.  Read him, as you can read a horse with your eyes, set free and charging over an endless green meadow on a windy day."

"Avoid 'explaining' too much and just [let] the reader encounter a situation."

"Poets are caretakers of language, and they know language and action are one."

"People think you make the gold of your poem out of nothing like Midas or something, but you don't.  You make the gold of your poem out of the seams of ore that you find."

"I do try to startle myself into a small combo of delight, wonder, and a dash of fright as I am composing a poem, just to keep me on my toes."

"I exhort poets to become like Felix the Cat, the cartoon character I grew up watching, who has a magic bag of tricks from which he can pull countless, miraculous items or which he can transform in an instant into whatever his mind conjures up."

"I write things down as I go along and keep it in a notebook and I know when I have enough words gathered for a poem.  It is like harvesting."

"I decided that I wanted to have a record for my sons that would say, 'Wow, Mom really marveled at the world.  She really championed the good on Earth.'  That's how Lucky Fish partially came to be.  And I've never really written for a specific audience in mind until that particular book."

"If you only write when inspired, you may be a fairly decent poet, but you'll never be a novelist."

"Let the poem teach me about poetry and what language can do, rather than being the captain of the ship."

"I'm much more interested in a poem you can never 'get' than the poem you can get after reading it once."

"Readings are social events.  I think poetry is written in isolation and is best understood in isolation.  I want readers; I don't want listeners."

"I ran with that, the idea that the sentence should have some kind of acoustic value."

"The way someone washes the dishes reveals the quality of his or her poetry."

"Do not just read the poets who sound like you and share your particular demographic or political beliefs, but read dangerously and adventurously."

"Great poetry or even excellent poetry is written by people who are not afraid to reveal their flaws."

"This is the other unofficial job description of the poet: to sanctify the era's unique thoughts and experience."

"The rhyming, the singing made the reality of the poem.  It's not about something outside of the poem.  It's the poem itself, and it rivals the world.  It becomes the world, as real and substantial as the world we think we're living in."

"The key to living a creative life is to trust your sense of things, to trust that your output—even a sketch or hastily scribbled poem on the back of an envelope—is worthwhile."

"Poets, like novelists, are allowed to experiment, embellish and most important, write poems that are from the viewpoint of someone else." (artist)

"I am too frequently undisciplined to imaginatively sustain a long work; my attention span is perfectly calibrated for writing poems.  For that reason, short fiction appeals to me, especially if I can approach them in short lyric bursts."

"Write the poem you would never show anyone."

"If there's anything that bores me in poetry, it's consistency.  Consistency is for insects."

"Maybe if we re-invent whatever our lives give us, we find poems."

"Poetry, the most intimate form of expression, gives us a deeper sense of reality than headlines and news stories ever could."

"For me, one of poetry's jobs is to negotiate the irrational and the incomprehensible.  Not to reconcile with those things."

"Poems hide. In the bottoms of our shoes, they are sleeping. They are the shadows drifting across our ceilings the moment before we wake up. What we have to do is live in a way that lets us find them."

"Know that a poem is published when it's read."  (artist)

"What I hope to do is be a part of this ocean of words that offers people something for which to wade in with their raft."

"The reason we tell stories, to judge from what I have seen among traditional people, is to keep each other from being afraid.  We tell stories and write poems, historically, to keep awe and aspiration and comprehension and the other components of hopeful lives bright in each other's hearts.  Storytelling is how we're moved to take care of each other when we recognize how extremely thin the veneer of civilization we cherish is, and how very hard it is to keep that veneer from shredding in the wind."

"We know in our deep and private places that we have a responsibility to take on things that draw our attention and to turn them into these mysterious objects—poems and stories—that illuminate, that offer an objection to the status quo, that warn and empower."

"I don't think about publishing books, or even my "poetry" in general, when I'm working.  I think in terms of one poem at a time.  The poem I'm writing always requires more attention than the poems I've written."