Common Quote by Basil Bunting

Whether you listen to a piece of music, or a poem, or look at a picture or a jug, or a piece of sculpture,…

— Basil Bunting

If you commit yourself to the art of poetry, you commit yourself to the task of learning how to see, using words as elements…

— Archibald MacLeish

Poetry, which is written while no one is looking, is meant to be looked at for all time.

— Kenneth Koch

A poem, necessarily, sits at a register that's different from our usual conversational voices. You have to listen more actively to get to the…

— Tracy K. Smith

A lot of the stuff that I see, because it's part of the work that I do, is look at pictures and photographs and…

— W. S. Di Piero

What you look for in a picture is a metaphor, something that means something more, that makes you think about things you've seen or…

— Mary Ellen Mark

Poetry is like painting: one piece takes your fancy if you stand close to it, another if you keep at some distance.

— Horace

Images are probably the most important part of the poem. First of all you want to tell a story, but images are what are…

— Anne Sexton

There's something immediate about the experience of reading a poem. It makes sense in my own mind, but I'm trying to figure out a…

— Kevin Powers

Each of us has a very rich nature and can look at things objectively, from a distance, and at the same time can have…

— Wislawa Szymborska

I know that in some ways I operate from a kind of antiquated interest in imagery, while many contemporary poets are not so interested…

— Martha Ronk

A poem can use anything to talk about anything.

— Jane Hirshfield