Children Quote by James Fenton

Writing poetry is a process of discovery...you can smell the poem before you see it…Like some animal.

— Denise Levertov

“To write or read a poem is . . . to enter into a different kind of thought world from our normal patterns. A…

— N.T. Wright

A poem is, so to speak, a way of making you forget how you wrote it.

— Randall Jarrell

I think writing a poem is like being a greyhound. Writing a novel is like being a mule. You go up one long row,…

— Ron Rash

The main thing a poem ought to be is musical. It should be rhythmic. You should hear it as a musical piece in your…

— John Cooper Clarke

Writing poetry is such an intense experience that it helps to start the process in a casual or wayward frame of mind.

— Edward Hirsch

Part of writing is discovering the rules of the game and then deciding whether to follow the rules or to break them. The great…

— Billy Collins

Writing poetry makes you intensely conscious of how words sound, both aloud and inside the head of the reader. You learn the weight of…

— Helen Dunmore

Poetry isn't like any writing I've ever heard before. I don't understand all of it, just bits of images, sentences that appear half-finished, all…

— Lauren Oliver

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

— John Fowles

What writing a poem really does - and what figuring how to perform effectively really does - is forces people to listen to you.…

— Daveed Diggs

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