Enough Quote by John Burnside

Sometimes I am puzzling over something for months and months and the poem gets created in small bursts and rewritten a hundred times, and…

— Sarah Kay

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

I never sit down to write. When I'm moved, I do it. I just wait for it to come. You just hear it. I…

— Lenny Kravitz

Sometimes I sit down and write, but I can write in my head line by line.

— Kodie Shane

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

I sit down and I write what I'm thinking and what I feel - it happens all at once, I never stop writing.

— Lydia Hearst

Sometimes you finish the poem, and that last piece clicks in place. Sometimes the poem is finished with you.

— Frederick Seidel

I have to make myself write, sometimes. In the space between poems, you somehow forget how to do it, where to begin. It was…

— Simon Armitage

I see the shape of the poem before I start writing, and the writing is just the process of arriving at the shape.

— Carol Ann Duffy

One reason to write a poem is to flush from the deep thickets of the self some thought, feeling, comprehension, question, music, you didn't…

— Jane Hirshfield

Most of the poems I write go through forty versions and then stay in a file on my computer. I'm not very good at…

— Nick Laird

A lot of things appearing under my byline were written in one draft. But when I started to write poetry, I started getting fussy…

— Richard Meltzer