Ginsberg's Collected Poems contains a wonderful poem about making it with Neal Cassady.
Thom Gunn

History is a cyclic poem written by time upon the memories of man.
Percy Bysshe Shelley

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

However, if a poem can be reduced to a prose sentence, there can't be much to it.
James Schuyler

I am still interested in the long or serial poem, but have written a few smaller things. I may start sending to journals again in a year or so... that's about it.
George Murray

I can't tell you where a poem comes from, what it is, or what it is for: nor can any other man. The reason I can't tell you is that the purpose of a poem is to go past telling, to be recognised by burning.
A. R. Ammons

I consider a poem to be a kind of experiment where a number of elements are brought together under test conditions to see how they will interact to create meaning or relevance.
John Barton

I deliberately wrote a poem in my last book where I was suggesting that there are other passions as great as or more important than the passion of sex.
Thom Gunn

I did that Grammys thing - I did a little freeform poem.
Beck

I do not usually revise much, though I often cut, particularly the end or toward the end of a poem.
James Schuyler

I don't know whether a poem has be there to help to develop something. I think it's there for itself, for what the reader finds in it.
Marilyn Hacker

I don't think there's anything wrong with someone having to read a poem twice. Or even a book.
George Murray

I find purer philosophy in a Poem than in a Conclusion of Geometry, a chemical analysis, or a physical law.
Wilfred Owen

I got $30 from Nation magazine for a poem and $500 for my first book of poems.
Jim Harrison

I have a high guilt quotient. A poem can go through as many as 50 or 60 drafts. It can take from a day to two years-or longer.
Rita Dove

I have experienced healing through other writers' poetry, but there's no way I can sit down to write in the hope a poem will have healing potential. If I do, I'll write a bad poem.
Marilyn Hacker

I have never started a poem yet whose end I knew. Writing a poem is discovering.
Robert Frost

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

I love to compare different time frames. Poetry can evoke the time of the subject. By a very careful choice of words you can evoke an era, completely throw the poem into a different time scale.
Robert Morgan

I read a poem every night, as others read a prayer.
Tahar Ben Jelloun