Capable Quote by Joan Larkin

I realized poetry's the thing that I can do 'cause I can stick at it and work with tremendous intensity.

— Philip Levine

I love anything that has to do with expanding and becoming more than you can actually become. Going further than you did before.

— Bobby Williams

How do poems grow? They grow out of your life.

— Robert Penn Warren

I don't think I'd ever get any better as a poet if I didn't push myself, very deliberately, to grow. My best poems surprise…

— James Arthur

“The Expanding Universe of Poetry Often I lose myself in such distances and numbers that I fear I shall never find myself again. But…

— Ondra Lysohorsky

I like to joke that I started writing long poems out the anxiety over ending and starting poems. It just seemed easier to keep…

— Alison Hawthorne Deming

And here in my isolation I can grow stronger. Poetry seems to come of itself, without effort, and I need only let myself dream…

— Paul Gauguin

I know when I go to a poetry reading, I feel purged, exulted. You let the poet guide you through some kind of journey.

— Anne Waldman

If a poem hasn't ripped apart your soul; you haven't experienced poetry.

— Anonymous

I think my poems immediately come out of the sensuous and emotional experiences I have.

— Sylvia Plath

I don't look on poetry as closed works. I feel they're going on all the time in my head and I occasionally snip off…

— John Ashbery

Manifesting that order of poetry where we can at last grow up to that which we stored up as we grew.

— Seamus Heaney