Cooking Quote by Maxine Kumin

In my own work, I usually revise through forty or fifty drafts of a poem before I begin to feel content with it.

— Mary Oliver

I've been writing a lot of poetry recently. It helps me think and work things out.

— Ed Westwick

I never think about poetry except when I'm writing it. I mean my poetry.

— Norman MacCaig

Most of the time I'm not really attracted to writing that's focused on filling and fighting it out within a well-defined container. I like…

— Stephen Vincent Benet

Things that I have a hard time being able to fully grasp, sometimes writing the poem helps me work through it. Or I get…

— Sarah Kay

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

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

— Philip Levine

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 use poetry to help me work through what I don’t understand, but I show up to each new poem with a backpack full…

— Sarah Kay

I tried to write poems in rhyme. I tried writing songs. Sometimes I jotted down a thought. I would keep a log of spontaneous…

— Chath Piersath

I write poems to figure things out

— Sarah Kay

I have written every poem, every novel, for the same purpose-to find out what I think, to know where I stand.

— May Sarton