Basements Quote by Matthea Harvey

my poems covered the bare places in my childhood like the fine, new skin under a scab that hasn't yet fallen off completely.

— Tove Ditlevsen

I also like poems that are haunted by a structure or a narrative, or poems that frisk flirtatiously at the boundary of sense.

— Matthea Harvey

Poetry is any page from a sketchbook of outlines of a doorknob with thumb-prints of dust, blood, dreams.

— Carl Sandburg

Well, probably I was fed up with concrete poetry. There was a lot of bad concrete poetry and besides, it was confused with visual…

— Ian Hamilton Finlay

I like poems you can tack all over with a hammer and there are no hollow places.

— John Ashbery

Anyone who says, “Here’s my address, write me a poem,” deserves something in reply. So I’ll tell you a secret instead: poems hide. In…

— Naomi Shihab Nye

I'm interested in concrete poems - anything that complicates the line between the written and the visual.

— Matthea Harvey

To the poet as a basement quilt, but perhaps To some reader a latticework of regrets ...

— John Ashbery

I think poems return us to that place of mud and dirt and earth, sun and rain.

— Kevin Young

I like poems that are complex.

— Peter Davison

Poems are rough notations for the music we are.

— Anonymous

Ever since I was a kid, I've always been interested in the poetry of melancholy, if you like.

— Steven Wilson