Bits Quote by Billy Collins

A good poem is an amazing thing: a perfectly distilled, articulate moment. It opens you up - sometimes slowly, like the blooming of a…

— Celeste Ng

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

— Louis Dudek

Before you go further, let me tell you what a poem brings, first, you must know the secret, there is no poem to speak…

— Juan Felipe Herrera

Poetry should be great and unobtrusive, a thing which enters into one's soul, and does not startle it or amaze it with itself, but…

— John Keats

If you can explain a poem, it is not a poem. Poetry has to be inexplicable.

— Luis Gonzalez

I felt it's vague enough for the reader to pull their own story and their wisdom out of the poem, but for me, it's…

— Masiela Lusha

Almost any poem has to be read twice, first for strangeness, second for clarity.

— Peter J. Daniels

It seems to me that readers sometimes make the genesis of a poem more mysterious than it is (by that I perhaps mean, think…

— James Schuyler

Poetry needs to be alive, unabashedly, and, for me, that entails seeing its complexity, the grit and grimness and jubilance and beauty.

— Alex Lemon

A really good poem is full of music.

— Eric Whitacre

“The fact that a good poem will never wholly submit to explanation is not its deficiency but its very life. One lives every day…

— John Ciardi

A good poem is like a bouillon cube. It's concentrated and it nourishes you when you need it.

— Rita Dove