Back and forth Quote by Paul Engle

Lily Brown writes with and against things in poems that are coiled up tight as springs (or snakes). A believer in the power of…

— Rae Armantrout

“The Poet With His Face In His Hands You want to cry aloud for your mistakes. But to tell the truth the world doesn’t…

— Mary Oliver

“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

“When my life is unraveling, and everything about it is slack, my poems are taut. My poems take the fray and wind it back…

— J.A. Huss

“all they want to do is tie the poem to a chair with rope and torture a confession out of it. They begin beating…

— Billy Collins

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

For poems are not words, after all, but fires for the cold, ropes let down to the lost, something as necessary as bread in…

— Mary Oliver

To write a poem is like trying to catch a lizard without its tail falling off.

— Lawrence Durrell

Introduction To Poetry I ask them to take a poem and hold it up to the light like a color slide or press an…

— Billy Collins

“i see poets riding the red winds unchecked by the borders of time, wandering with light feet over the land mines and trip wires,…

— Peter Standish Evans

“from 'Incident Light Poem' And all surprisingly without outrage without gunshot without a call of timber with/out bleak rows to fall: Light follows the…

— Andrea Strudensky

“A poem is a heroic act of integration that binds into rough harmony the chorus of forces within and outside the soul. A poem…

— Tony Hoagland