Displacement Quote by Randall Mann

“But often it's the inexact, the awful, the mistaken linguistic turn that manages to say the right thing because it unmoors us from our…

— Tin House Books

Poetry is the enemy of the poem.

— Stanley Kunitz

“To say that a poet is justified in employing a disintegrating form in order to express a feeling of disintegration, is merely a sophistical…

— Yvor Winters

“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

Like many modern poets, I tend to conceal rhymes by placing them in the middle of lines, and to avoid immediate alliteration and assonance…

— Margaret Atwood

It's difficult to know when to put an inverted comma around a poem.

— Tim Key

One of the most powerful devices of poetry is the use of distortions. You can go from talking about the way a minute passes…

— Robert Morgan

Poems are rough notations for the music we are.

— Anonymous

the attempt to control poetry, to subordinate it to extra-poetic ends, constitutes misuse.

— Jan Clausen

The poem in the head is always perfect. Resistance begins when you try to convert it into language.

— Stanley Kunitz

All poetry is misrepresentation.

— Jeremy Bentham

Poetry is prose, bent out of shape.

— J. Patrick Lewis