Crafts Quote by Robert Bly

What inspires a poem for me is usually a moment.

— Sherman Alexie

“We became poets before we learned to walk Our roots dug deep with the slight touch of love Our leaves sprouted after pain.”

— Avijeet Das

Finally, I began to write about becoming an older woman and the trepidation it stirred. The small, telling "betrayals" of my body. The stalled,…

— Sue Monk Kidd

You really felt a radical shift in the advance of a poetics that had really been engendered by [Walt] Whitman. This was very exciting.…

— Anne Waldman

Our moments of inspiration are not lost though we have no particular poem to show for them; for those experiences have left an indelible…

— Henry David Thoreau

I think my poems immediately come out of the sensuous and emotional experiences I have.

— Sylvia Plath

My life has been the poem I would have writ, But I could not both live and utter it.

— Henry David Thoreau

I believe in rooting poems in actual places, even if you move into some other extraordinary realm.

— Edward Hirsch

The first poem I ever wrote, about loss, when I was 5 years old, expressed the themes of everything I would ever write.

— Marguerite Young

It was not the beautiful or pleasant feelings that gave me new insight, but the ones against which I fought most strongly: feelings that…

— Alice Miller

I think my biggest revelation was to write entirely from the heart, and to convey emotion, even when it meant forcing myself to feel…

— Alex Gaskarth

I gave up on new poetry myself 30 years ago when most of it began to read like coded messages passing between lonely aliens…

— Russell Baker