Arcs Quote by Anna Journey

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

— Philip Levine

A number of poems don't work alone. They need to fit together to work.

— Martha Ronk

A poet's mission is to make words do more work than they normally do, to make them work on more than one level.

— Jay-Z

Each poem seems to demand its own formal approach. In both drafting and revision, I'll play around with line lengths and stanza formations, eventually…

— Allison Joseph

When I am writing fiction, I believe I am much better organized, more methodical - one has to be when writing a novel. Writing…

— Margaret Atwood

Writing essays and teaching composition have helped me immensely in writing poetry, because they've forced me to focus on the structure of ideas.

— Aaron Belz

While I don't satisfy my curiosity about the way I work, I'm terribly curious about the way other poets work. But I would think…

— Thom Gunn

Writing a poem is always a process of subtracting: you start with all of language available to you, and you choose a smaller field.

— Matthea Harvey

When you break a poem down in order to perform it, you have to engage closely with many aspects of what it's about, how…

— Michael Rosen

I think the occupation of my poetry is akin to this desire to be many things at once - things that sometimes conflict. Regarding…

— Dawn Lundy Martin

“I make work that is many things at once: poems that are prose, that are pictures, that are poem and picture. Actions that are…

— Jen Besemer

Most of the time I'm not really attracted to writing that's focused on filling and fighting it out within a well-defined container. I like…

— Stephen Vincent Benet