Always trying Quote by Alison Hawthorne Deming

I like bringing poetry's focus on figurative language and compression into the essay. Of course, the musical properties of language, the cadence of the…

— Alison Hawthorne Deming

The long poem cannot be a digressive, expansive, boring exposition. It is really made of very sharp, Imagistic, quintessential poetic elements.

— Louis Dudek

I'm trying to put more elements of the essay into my writing.

— Ryszard Kapuscinski

The essay is a literary device for saying almost everything about almost anything

— Aldous Huxley

Poetry, for me, conveys the essence of narrative rather than its particulars.

— Delia Sherman

Poetry is the hardest thing that there is. It fascinates me, so I want to write more of it.

— Steve Earle

Fiction and poetry are my first loves, but the really beautiful lyrical essay can do so much that other forms cannot.

— Chris Abani

The essay is one of my favourite forms of writing, and I feel like what's inside is really personal, more so than with shorter…

— Stephanie Pearl-McPhee

What characterizes a poem is its necessary dependence on words as much as its struggle to transcend them.

— Octavio Paz

Perhaps first and foremost is the challenge of taking what I find as a reader and making it into a poem that, primarily, has…

— Marilyn Hacker

Many good poets are really essayists who write very short essays.

— Nicholson Baker

A lot of people are writing poems and don't realize it. They have this limited idea of how the poem should sound or what…

— Matthea Harvey