I see the poem or the novel ending with an open door.
Michael Ondaatje

I sometimes talk about the making of a poem within the poem.
Howard Nemerov

I think I'm a very good reader of poetry, but obviously, like everybody, I have a set of criteria for reading poems, and I'm not shy about presenting them, so if people ask for my critical response to a poem, I tell them what works and why, and what doesn't work and why.
Diane Wakoski

I think of my peace paintings as one long poem, with each painting being a single stanza.
Robert Indiana

I think that I shall never see a poem lovely as a tree.
Joyce Kilmer

I think that there are fiction writers for whom that works well. I could never do it. I feel as if, by the time I see that it's a poem, it's almost written in my head somewhere.
Sharon Olds

I think you can have the greatest lyrics in the world and if it doesn't have the best tune in the world it will suck. I mean if the music wasn't important it would just be a poem.
Julian Cope

I thought I'd begin by reading a poem by Shakespeare, but then I thought, why should I? He never reads any of mine.
Spike Milligan

I try not to observe myself in the process of composing a poem because I don't want to come up with a formula, which I would then be unscrupulous in using.
Thom Gunn

I was reading the dictionary. I thought it was a poem about everything.
Steven Wright

I would not say I chose to write long poems on a conscious level. The long poem has been a relative constant.
John Barton

I've never read a political poem that's accomplished anything. Poetry makes things happen, but rarely what the poet wants.
Howard Nemerov

I've thought of the last line of some poems for years and tried them out, It wouldn't work because the last line was much too beautiful for the poem.
Howard Nemerov

If a poem is each time new, then it is necessarily an act of discovery, a chance taken, a chance that may lead to fulfillment or disaster.
A. R. Ammons

If a poem is not memorable, there's probably something wrong. One of the problems of free verse is that much of the free verse poetry is not memorable.
Robert Morgan

If I were to agree to write the music for your beautiful poem, it would tie your poem up for some years as I have agreements and obligations which I must respect.
Jules Massenet

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

If that voice that you created that is most alive in the poem isn't carried throughout the whole poem, then I destroy where it's not there, and I reconstruct it so that that voice is the dominant voice in the poem.
Philip Levine

If you cannot be a poet, be the poem.
David Carradine

If you know what you are going to write when you're writing a poem, it's going to be average.
Derek Walcott