There'll always be working people in my poems because I grew up with them, and I am a poet of memory.
Philip Levine

There's not too much difference between writing a picture book and writing a collection of a hundred poems or so, except that the bigger books take a lot longer to do.
Jack Prelutsky

There's one of my new poems actually - is a good example of where my poetry has ended up. My earlier river poetry was more like a cross between Shelley and Dylan Thomas.
Robert Adamson

These poems, with all their crudities, doubts, and confusions, are written for the love of Man and in praise of God, and I'd be a damn' fool if they weren't.
Dylan Thomas

To me many short poems read and write like beginnings that simply whet my appetite; I want to get over that.
John Barton

Today the U.S. is farther from being nourished by poetry than it was a hundred years ago, when books of poems were best-sellers.
James Broughton

We all write poems; it is simply that poets are the ones who write in words.
John Fowles

We have a lot of long narrative poems written in the 20th century, but they're not very well known, and they're not read by very many people.
Robert Morgan

We read Robert Browning's poetry. Here we needed no guidance from the professor: the poems themselves were enough.
Carl Sandburg

We tend to put poems into factions. And it restricts our reading.
Thom Gunn

Well it is certainly the case that the poems - which were in fact published during Shakespeare's lifetime - are weird if they began or originated in this form, as I think they did, because the poems get out of control.
Stephen Greenblatt

Well, "The Wellspring" was written from 1983 to 1986. And it had a section in the beginning that was poems that began from others' experience.
Sharon Olds

Well, the great thing for me about poetry is that in good poems the dislocation of words, that is to say, the distance between what they say they're saying and what they are actually saying is at its greatest.
Harry Mathews

What I'm fighting for now in my work... for an expression relevant to all manner of blacks, poems I could take into a tavern, into the street, into the halls of a housing project.
Gwendolyn Brooks

What we call a poem is mostly what is not there on the page. The strength of any poem is the poems that it has managed to exclude.
Harold Bloom

When I first started to write, I was aware of being queer, but I didn't write about it. Queer poems would probably not have been accepted by the editors I sent them to.
Thom Gunn

Why does one always ask a writer why they stopped? I am sure everyone finds in any drawer a few dear poems.
Peter Bichsel

Yes, I do often write poems from the mind, but I hope I don't ignore feelings and emotions.
Anne Stevenson

You don't help people in your poems. I've been trying to help people all my life - that's my trouble.
Charles Olson

You must understand the whole of life, not just one little part of it. That is why you must read, that is why you must look at the skies, that is why you must sing and dance, and write poems and suffer and understand, for all that is life.
Jiddu Krishnamurti