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

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

An experienced reader uses the poem as an agent of inquiry. This makes poetry very exciting, unstable, and interactive.
John Barton

And at least in poetry you should feel free to lie. That is, not to lie, but to imagine what you want, to follow the direction of the poem.
Mark Strand

And your very flesh shall be a great poem.
Walt Whitman

Arranging a bowl of flowers in the morning can give a sense of quiet in a crowded day - like writing a poem or saying a prayer.
Anne Morrow Lindbergh

At the point where I'm trying to force something and it's not happening, and I'm getting frustrated with, say, writing a poem, I can go and pick up the brushes and start painting. At the point where the painting seems to not be going anywhere, I go and pick up the guitar.
Joni Mitchell

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

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

Considered subjectively, philosophy always begins in the middle, like an epic poem.
Karl Wilhelm Friedrich Schlegel

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

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

Elizabeth Barrett Browning could write a poem two pages long. Could she have brought it to a music publisher?
Dorothy Fields

Every day we should hear at least one little song, read one good poem, see one exquisite picture, and, if possible, speak a few sensible words.
Johann Wolfgang Von Goethe

Every old poem is sacred.
Horace

Every single soul is a poem.
Michael Franti

For many years, I thought a poem was a whisper overheard, not an aria heard.
Rita Dove

For me a poem has to sing out of itself and the lilt of it carries the magic.
James Broughton

For what is a poem but a hazardous attempt at self-understanding: it is the deepest part of autobiography.
Robert Penn Warren

From the reader's view, a poem is more demanding than prose.
Mark Strand