Clarity Quote by Yusef Komunyakaa

Poems can't help but be personal. Mine are certainly an accurate blueprint of the things I think about, if not a record of my…

— Matthea Harvey

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

— Sylvia Plath

Poems are other people's snapshots in which we see our own lives.

— Charles Simic

I'm always talking about how the poems I am most obsessed with are like people: complex and unknowable and with a huge capacity for…

— Ada Limon

But at the beginning it was clear to me that concrete poetry was peculiarly suited for using in public settings. This was my idea,…

— Ian Hamilton Finlay

Sometimes I feel too transparent in my poetry, but that's what I think the beauty of poetry is, because as transparent as the author…

— Masiela Lusha

I'm all over my poems, even if their relation to my everyday life is that of dream to reality.

— Matthea Harvey

My poems - I don't even like the sound of that, in a way. Not that anyone else wrote them. But we know that…

— Sharon Olds

I don't let a poem go into the world unless I feel that I've transformed the experience in some way. Even poems I've written…

— Stephen Dunn

My poems were just kind of all over the place. They had no focus, no location, nothing. Kind of a series of images that…

— James Welch

My poems mean what people take them to mean.

— Paul Valery

A poem is a private story, after all, no matter how apparently public. The reader is always overhearing a confession.

— Jorie Graham