“I love writing. I love the swirl and swing of words as they tangle with human emotions.”
James Michener
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“One of the major sources of poetry for me was silence, all that’s not spoken about . . . So the silences in our culture — I think, in a way, poems are sucked out of us by the magnetic attraction of that silence.”
Sharon Olds
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… And I came to poetry as a way of saving myself because I was so wretchedly discontent. It wasn’t enough to be a housewife and mother. It didn’t gratify great chunks of me.”
Maxine Kumin
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“I’m trying to accurately portray states of mind, ones of my own that I think might have a general application, and the movements of the mind and the way we think and forget and discover and forget some more.”
John Ashbery
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“Emily Dickinson affected me at my heart’s core– and does– because what she writes about concerns me: the inability to get to heaven.”
Charles Wright
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“Almost all our sadnesses are moments of paralysis of feeling when we can no longer hear our surprised feelings of living.”
Rainer Maria Rilke
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“A poem is a serious joke, a truth that has learned jujitsu. Anyone who breathes is in the rhythm business; anyone who is alive is caught up in the imminences, the doubts mixed with the triumphant certainty, of poetry.”
William Stafford
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“My poetry is, or should be, useful to me for one reason: it is the recording of my individual struggle from darkness toward some measure of light . . . My poems are written for the love of man and in praise of God, and I’d be a damn fool if they weren’t.”
Dylan Thomas
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“The whole universe is humming, is vibrating. It’s that hum that I want to hear. That’s the subject of my poems … The words are like birds that perch on this frequency of sound.”
Li Young-Lee