Alleys Quote by Mary Ruefle

The writing of an assay-type poem or a poem investigating perspective isn't an exercise of rational or strategic mind. Poems for me are acts…

— Jane Hirshfield

There is something about writing poetry that brings a man close to the cliff's edge.

— Charles Bukowski

“Should I get lost, just point me in the direction of a poem.”

— Betty Bleen

“A poem is a fictional, verbally inventive moral statement in which it is the author, rather than the printer or word processor, who decides…

— Terry Eagleton

Some poems present themselves as cliffs that need to be climbed. Others are so defensive that when you approach their enclosure you half expect…

— Stanley Kunitz

Poems offer us counter-knowledges. They let us see what is invisible to ordinary looking, and to find in overlooked corners the opulence of our…

— Jane Hirshfield

To approach a poem as if it is a puzzle to be understood is to miss the point.

— John Cooper Clarke

That is the best instruction you could ever give a poet: whether you're examining a bad line in a poem or a bad motive…

— Alice Oswald

Poetry requires deliberate movement in its direction, a filament of faith in its persistence, receptivity to its fundamental worthwhileness. Within its unanesthetized heart there…

— C.D. Wright

I write poetry to figure things out. Any time I’m trying to wrap my head around something, poetry is like a puzzle-solving strategy for…

— Sarah Kay

What I try to do is to go into a poem - and one writes them, of course, poem by poem - to go…

— Paul Muldoon

“Poetry ~~ No definition of poetry is adequate unless it be poetry itself. The most accurate analysis by the rarest wisdom is yet insufficient,…

— Henry Daid Thoreau Journal 26 Jan 1840