Train, Sugar Museum Marcelo Salado, Caibarién, Cuba

Middle Street

Gorgonesque

At the Tracks, New Bern, North Carolina

Painter's Palette

Wall, Washington, North Carolina

Loosely Linked

Flotsam, Maine

Orbits (Fort Macon Floor)

Urban Geometry, Toronto

Stack

Shovel Blade

Quotations for Writers

...in no particular order....

Umbrellascape, Santa Fe, New Mexico

Black Hole Sun

Marina Reflection

Woods, Late Afternoon

Coiled Lines, Monhegan Island, Maine

Electric Trees

Shadow frolic

Barn, Cameron, North Carolina

Jeanne Julian

Cozy Nook

My Latest Crush

Billboard, North Carolina

Poetry.  Photography.

Hull

Each season some melancholy young face would stare soulfully from the cover of the latest issue of American Poetry Review, a journal dedicated to the principle that a new author need not be talented, only photogenic.
—Dana Gioia, "James Tate and American Surrealism"

Write because you are still breathing and your heart, which is probably already diseased, still beats.—Elias Canetti, The Book Against Death

Our vocation, the writer’s life, allows us to believe that we are always at the beginning of things, since each new story we write, each new novel, each new sentence, for that matter, turns us once again into novices, freshmen, lone travelers in uncharted lands, debutantes—eternally new at this, eternally attempting to tell a story that’s never been told before.
Not a bad thing. Really.
—Alice McDermott

Getting started, keeping going, getting started again — in art and in life, it seems to me this is the essential rhythm not only of achievement but of survival, the ground of convinced action, the basis of self-esteem and the guarantee of credibility in your lives, credibility to yourselves as well as to others.
—Seamus Heaney, commencement address, 1996

For a long time, a consistent writing practice eluded me, although I wanted that more that anything else. Why did I want it so fervently? I felt inspired, passionate, and certain that I was a writer to my core and I wanted to do it well. I felt restless, scattered, unskilled. I felt weak in the face of the practical and spiritual obstacles that emerged from one day to the next, reminding me of the gap between my desire and my abilities, and tormenting me with the existential fear that I would not self-actualize. I needed to give it time. I needed to fail and fail again. And read. I needed to read a lot. I needed to chill out and find the faith to persevere.

More than anything, I sought the holy grail of undivided attention because when I drop into that deep place, THINGS HAPPEN, and it always feels good. I also craved—still crave—the sense of well being that washes over me after I’ve visited that altered state that is sometimes known as flow.
—Holly Wren Spaulding

I have no perspective on what I am doing. I write a song and think, ‘Where does this come from?’ Me? I wrote this? I write fiction … I’m just enjoying myself, throwing lines together. I think it always reflects your own experience and feelings, but it isn’t always in a way that’s clear. If you find something honest enough in yourself then it will be universal.
—Richard Thompson, musician

I learned something from every poem I ever wrote, even if it was ill conceived, cloying, or stupid.
—Diane Seuss

Put your manuscript in a drawer until you become its reader rather than its writer.
—Zadie Smith

Maybe that audience will be just one woman in a bookstore desperately needing a story like her story and a voice like her voice and she finds a single worn copy of one of my books and feels companioned on a rainy Thursday afternoon. My book will be crushed between copies of other forgotten authors but, by chance, she will choose it, sit on the bookstore floor and read it, putting it back where she found it because she has no money to buy it, yet walking out into the mist she gathers a bit more strength to smile slightly and carry on. I’ve been that woman. I’m glad she and I have found each other. This is what poets can do.
—Kimberly Ann Priest in Hole in the Head Review

There's a path between wisdom and awe which is hard to tread, and even harder the wiser we are and the more we've seen. I read your wisdom in many of these poems. And also, a little self deprecation which we discourage.

I just need more awe.

—An editor, in declining my poems

It takes chutzpah to write. A certain arrogance to think others want to hear your stories. I can spot writers—often men—who’ve been taught from the start that what they think is interesting and worthy. They carry themselves in life and on the page with confidence. Then there are writers like me—perhaps more often women—who write to prove that we do in fact know something. We may stumble in person but can summon the words on the written page. Our type of writer will win in the long run, we think. We’ll have the last say.
—Virginia Pye

I’m not here for the accolades. I’m here for the experience.
—Lenny Kravitz, musician

What is such skill for? the poet wonders. Is it mere pastime?  Is it trickery?  No, it is not trickery in the sense of deception or gimmickry, but is instead a timeless amazement.  The solitary artisan, whether peeling an apple or fashioning words into lines, reminds us of the interconnectedness of great and small, playful and serious, planet and fruit, and perhaps even jealousy and homage.  Or is it just a poem about a pensive old man peeling an apple on a quiet night, clock ticking away?  Could be.  All successful poetry has an element of the unsayable in it. And that is its magic.
— David Graham, Poetic License 2019, No. 32, "In Praise of Minor Poems"

Perhaps we have this tacit expectation that a proper poem must arrive at some form of insight or even transcendence. That is a lot of pressure. You shouldn’t worry whether your poem is going to take off or not when you first start drafting. Poetic ambition can be deadly in the beginning stage of creation. The prose poem is a great entrance into writing, because it’s down–to–earth, even unpoetic appearance takes some of the pressure off and makes us start playing with words right there and then. We can stay our quotidian selves and still be ecstatic. And who knows, one day, we might find ourselves flying, one way or another.
—Miho Nonaka, interview with Jefferson Navicky, The Cafe Review, October 2023

The act of creating art is a process that consciously embraces this mystery of life. To participate in this creation called life is to look for clues. One clue leads to the next clue. I must consciously challenge my own thoughts, emotions, and opinions in order to find/create the next clue.

The plot unravels. This mystery, this divine conspiracy, grows larger and more inclusive as you explore it. It becomes increasingly obvious that everyone and everything is involved. Eventually you realize that you are an integral part of the mystery. You are the Great Mystery.
—Marcus Amerman, Choctaw artist

When we read with fine attention, we find ourselves caring about people who are various, muddled, uncertain, and not quite like us (and this is good).
—Zadie Smith, lecture on Forster (from essay by Andrea Long Chu) 

And when he took on the impossible book, something sometimes happened to him: a run, a state of flow, a pure streak. As those who are prone to them know, these simulate real living, which we are somehow barred from otherwise. ‘I’m deep into something long,’ he wrote to Pietsch in 2006, ‘and it’s hard for me to get back into it when I’m pulled away.’ He developed a habit of not leaving the house, in case he might write that day. ‘Once when I pressed him,’ Pietsch said, ‘he described working on the new novel as like wrestling sheets of balsa wood in a high wind.’

—Patricia Lockwood, on David Foster Wallace, London Review of Books

But something even more powerful was at work as I read, something harder to make sense of, let alone characterize: At the time I thought of it — always in italics — as the sound. Intuitively, on the margins of my consciousness, I came to understand: The sound was the thing. It set the mood, it lit the world, it kept everything in motion. This second lesson was, if possible, even more pivotal than the first: Never mind your plot outline, your carefully thought-out themes, your take on human nature. Forget your own name if you have to. It may take years, it may be agony — but find the sound. That’s all you need. The rest of it will follow.  —John Wray on Cormac McCarthy

On a day no different from the one now breaking, Shakespeare sat down to begin Hamlet.
—Robert D. Richardson Jr., Emerson: The Mind on Fire

It is very pleasant to be praised, but it doesn't actually help you.
—Francis Bacon, painter

It is important to test your poems against the ear. The page is a cold bed.
—Stanley Kunitz

It doesn’t matter if we’re getting it right. In fact, let’s just agree that getting it right is not the goal. Or perhaps we might even go so far as to say that getting it right does not exist. The dignity and nobility of practice, of the very attempt itself, allows for the possibility that one day we will deepen our understanding of what it is to be alive, here and now. Perhaps we will even make something beautiful and meaningful out of all that we don’t yet know. So consider this your permission to get it wrong, to fail, to learn, to grow as a human and as an artist.
—Dani Shapiro

If writing is thinking and discovery and selection and order and meaning, it is also awe and reverence and mystery and magic.
—Toni Morrison, "The Site of Memory"

At Juilliard, Andrei Belgrader told me "A great thing to do right before you go onstage—even if you don't believe it—is to stick your arms out in the air and go, I'm a genius. Then walk onstage. Because it'll create that energy within you."
—Jessica Chastain in Vanity Fair

What you write down becomes fixed. It takes on the constraints of any tangible entity. It collapses into a reality estranged from the realm of its creation. It’s a marker. A roadsign. You have stopped to get your bearings, but at a price. You’ll never know where it might have gone if you’d left it alone to go there. In any conjecture you’re always looking for weaknesses. But sometimes you have the sense that you should hold off. Be patient. Have a little faith. You really want to see what the conjecture is itself is going to drag up out of the murk….The reservations that you yourself in your world of struggle bring to the table may actually be alien to the path of these emerging structures. Their own intrinsic doubts are steering-mechanisms while yours are more like brakes. Of course the idea is going to come to an end anyway. Once…it is formalized…it may have a certain luster to it but with rare exceptions you can no longer entertain the illusion that it holds some deep insight into the core of reality. It has in fact begun to look like a tool….The problem is that what drives the tale will not survive the tale.
—Cormac McCarthy, The Passenger (the character of Alice, on mathematics)

At present, we’re not wanted. Only glitz and outrage. But our day will come, even if we’re no longer here.
—Lynne Mapp Drexler (1928–1999), painter

[A]s I lay waiting for the dawn, the long lines of the desired poem began to twine themselves in my mind.... With a sudden effort, I sprang out of bed, and found in the dimness an old stump of a pen... I scrawled the verses almost without looking at the paper.
—Julia Ward Howe

When I sit down in order to write, sometimes it’s there; sometimes it’s not. But that doesn’t bother me anymore. I tell my students there is such a thing as "writer’s block," and they should respect it. You shouldn’t write through it. It’s blocked because it ought to be blocked, because you haven’t got it right now. All the frustration and nuttiness that comes from "Oh, my God, I cannot write now" should be displaced. It’s just a message to you saying, "That’s right, you can’t write now, so don’t." We operate with deadlines, so facing the anxiety about the block has become a way of life. We get frightened about the fear. I can’t write like that. If I don’t have anything to say for three or four months, I just don’t write.
—Toni Morrison

If you feel safe in the area that you’re working in, you’re not working in the right area. Always go a little further into the water than you feel you’re capable of being in. Go a little bit out of your depth and when you don’t feel that your feet are quite touching the bottom, you’re just about in the right place to do something exciting.

—David Bowie

I have always been chasing something. But one of the surprises that life has held for me is that I am happier as an old woman than I ever was as a young one. Perhaps the reason for this is that I realized now it does not matter whether we arrive. The joy is in the going.
—Bayard Wootten, photographer, 1875-1959

In my 20th Century Poetry Class, the students enjoy reading poems out loud. It's wonderful for me because I get tired of hearing my own voice and like to sit back and listen to their voices instead. Some of them read clearly and with expression while others struggle a little, but they seem to like holding the fullness of the words in their mouths and feeling the movement of syllables on their tongues. I'm convinced that reading poetry out loud sparks something wonderful in our brains.
—Beth Copeland

Magical realism...says: the world is both this and that. It says reality slips, shimmers, and dodges; and stories and possibilities are always multiple, infinite; and to reclaim this infinite possibility of the tongue and the pen is the ultimate act of liberation. This is how we end up with a novel like, say, The Satanic Verses, which is so irreverent in its treatment of mythology as to nearly get its author killed, but whose ultimate message is that stories, identities, and realities are plural, and any healthy culture must accept and celebrate that plurality.
—Ellie Robbins in LitHub

The thing of unfixing—…which is to say that, like my poems, like someone else’s work, essays, whatever, like who I want to be in conversation with or relationship with—I don’t want to assume that I know what the thing ought to be. I don’t want to impose a system of knowledge on the thing. I don’t want to impose an end point on the thing, which is to say I don’t wanna fix the thing. Often, when I’ve been in and taught workshops, and when I’ve witnessed other young writers in workshops, I notice that there’s two objectives: one is to fix the piece—you could have a good workshop if something got fixed. And the other thing is that you could have a good workshop if people liked your work. So, it’s like “I’m fixable” or “I’m good.” And those just sort of, on principle, seem to be antithetical to the side of this question of how you make a meaningful thing or how you make a transformative thing….Can you just observe with curiosity? Can you observe with curiosity and can you ask questions?
—Ross Gay in The Rumpus

Oh yes, we thrive on the unexpected metaphor, the well-honed line, the expressive reading. Poetry, though, is more than craft. It is the art and magic of connecting, the door that opens shared experience, a key to community. As we share poetry we share our self. Suddenly there are two of us walking this journey of humanness, two to delve its depths, two to breach its heights. Wherever poets and lovers of poetry gather, wherever a hard and beautiful and true word is spoken, there is joy.
—Bill Griffin

You can't see what has shaped (or occluded) your vision until you live somewhere that makes you see how it is you conduct your looking, your liking, your affinities and aversions.
—Heather Treseler

The idea that a writer represents, I resist. I represent me.

—Abdulrazak Gurnah

In good poetry I discover how the poet feels; in excellent poetry I discover

how I feel.
—Bill Griffin

A new idea is delicate. It can be killed by a sneer or a yawn.
― Ovid

We understand that, as with the elephant and the blind men of the parable, the best poetry presents to its readers more than any one person can take in and process at once.
— The Editors, Futurecycle Press

the madgirl and saint unrecognized and writing madrigal in bedroom and recipe in library and songs during class and sketching sunflowers for what’s left of us...
— from "Howl" by Amy Newman in Poetry, July/August 2015

I’ve heard that reading my poems ‘is like getting dense chocolate shoved violently down your throat.’ I’ve heard my poems ‘lack upward sweep of life and hope.’ I’ve heard that ‘real art is harder’ than whatever it is I’m trying to do. I once got a rejection ‘letter’ in the form of my empty SASE with the word ‘NO’ written in permanent marker on the back flap. A poet I respect once called me ‘a bleachy blonde ham poisoning the microphone.’ Back in high school I told this hot drama-guy I was a poet and he said, ‘Why does every girl think she’s a goddamn poet? It’s a phase, not a career, okay? Don’t be such a walking cliché.’ There are many reasons I write—for example I love lying but hate bullshit—but the main reasons have to be the 3 S’s: Spite, Schadenfreude, and Sexual insufficiency.
— Karyna McGlynn in Rattle #27, Summer 2007

Let’s be honest, poems are nearly invisible and yet for the one making them, they connect to so much else that matters.
— Holly Wren Spalding

I...found myself sitting in a room with 16 playwrights. I remember looking around and thinking that since I was sitting there, I must be a playwright, which is absolutely critical to the work. It is important to claim it.
— August Wilson

Poetry is, above all, a singing art of natural and magical connection because, though it is born out of one's person's solitude, it has the ability to reach out and touch in a humane and warmly illuminating way the solitude, even the loneliness, of others. That is why, to me, poetry is one of the most vital treasures that humanity possesses; it is a bridge between separated souls.
— Brendan Kennelly

There is so much work that could be done when we meditate on a poem, rather than constantly putting pen to paper, marking things up because it seems very productive. In fact, so much of creation is thinking. For me, stepping away from a poem or reading a poem without manipulating it as part of the drafting process is really powerful. You realize that something you recognize on Day One becomes very forgettable on Day Three. But then something else — this bigger thing underneath — comes through, and you say, Oh my goodness, if I were to write another draft right away, I would have missed all that.
— Ocean Vuong

Writing is an ongoing fascination and challenge, as well as being the only form of spirituality I can consistently practice. I started as a poet and will always return to poetry—both reading and writing it—for that sense of deep discovery and communion I find there. There are only two useful rules I can think of for aspiring writers: learn your craft, and persist. The rest, as Henry James said, is the madness of art.
— Kim Addonizio

I get rejected constantly! In truth, it doesn’t bother me terribly, I guess partly because I’m used enough to rejection by now to generally anticipate it; it rarely comes as a surprise....I tend to think of it a bit like playing the lottery, with comparable odds: I’m hopeful but not expectant, and I remind myself that even if I don’t 'win,' I really won’t have lost anything—and, anyway, no one else is keeping score. To make oneself vulnerable is to take a risk, and while we obviously always want to hear a 'yes,' I don’t believe that there’s anything inherently wrong with a 'no.' This sounds counter-intuitive, but I try to treat rejection almost as an opportunity. It’s a chance, like any piece of feedback, for me to ask myself: is there something I should change, or do I stand by what I’ve done? Either way, the outcome is (or can be) positive; perhaps I notice room for revision where I didn’t before, or, alternately, I’m challenged to defend my choices once again to my harshest critic—myself.
 — Hannah Aizneman

If we believe we have to confine ourselves to a certain style or subject; if we value appearances, approval, and easy affirmation over our capacity for questioning; if we become more concerned with publication credits, prizes, and prestige than with poetry—that shows in the writing. Remember, the writing is the important part. Resist the impulse to shape or judge your work and worth as a writer according to illusory, capricious metrics—instead, hone your faculty for curiosity; learn to follow what truly interests, excites, perplexes, or pains you; put it in the poems....[F}ocus on becoming the reader and the writer that you want to be—which is to say, on the reading and the writing. Be generous; trust yourself. Your love of the art is all you can really count on. Let the practice, the process, be what ultimately matters. Let it be enough.

— Hannah Aizneman

When I’m writing a poem, and I get stuck, it’s often because I’ve forgotten this principle: The next line could always be anything. The poem has free will; the future in the poem is not beholden to its past. This is true for any piece of writing, but poetry seems to foreground those choices, those leaps outside logic or predictability, as if the possibilities of what comes next are more infinite in a poem.

I’ve started thinking of this moment, this chess move where the poet breaks a line and almost resets the game, as the lyric decision. How do poets decide what comes next? How do they make us want to read another line, and another? There has to be a system of coherence to the poem — even a list of random horses has coherence, via theme — but it can’t be unsurprising either. A series of lyric decisions is how we write something between order and chaos.
— Elisa Gabbert, New York Times, January 25, 2022

The dance between memory and the imagination is available to every reader who ever gasped upon turning a page, or woke thinking with joy about the unfinished novel that awaited him or her. It is a collusion—call it a conspiracy of thought—between a stranger's ideas and a reader's grasp of them: a baseball that falls, every time and perfectly, into a waiting catcher's mitt. This arc of intent and destination is the essence of language, and no amount of 3-D graphics or prime-time highjinks can either trump or compromise that.
— Gail Caldwell, Boston Globe

To your generation, I must represent the literary equivalent of tufted furniture and gas chandeliers.
— Edith Wharton, to F. Scott Fitzgerald

I think what you learn through time is that you have the ability to regenerate, if you put your heart and mind to it. You have to apply discipline, and get out of your own way.
— Juliette Lewis

Reflecting on [the film] Josie and the Pussycats, [Rax] King attempts to delineate between good works of art and perfect ones. ‘The good is tasteful,’ she writes. ‘You can see that thought has gone into it. It is carefully layered, and so lends itself nicely to interpretation.’ Perfect art, King argues, resists such interpretation. It leans fully into the erotic. The perfect, in this account, is not perfect because it is flawless, but because it allows us to enjoy it on an emotional level, without obliging us to seek some greater emotional meaning…. [But] to my mind, a ‘perfect’ work of art is safe, strikes all the expected themes and hedges itself against criticism. A good piece of art dares to be interesting, flaws and all. In this sense, it’s often the good that speaks to us best when the perfect rebuffs our attention, our desire to make it our own. It’s why I’ll always love the singer-songwriter with the warbly, imperfect voice over the flawless pop star, or the novelist who’s a fantastic prose stylist over the best-selling thriller writer.
— Marin Cogan, The Washington Post

If we devote our lives to poetry, and take our lives seriously, we must praise and denounce with equal ferocity. People who follow the notion that praise alone is acceptable . . . should sell Toyotas.
—Donald Hall

How unusual to be living a life of continual self-expression,
jotting down little things,
noticing a leaf being carried down a stream,
then wondering what will become of me,

and finally to work alone under a lamp
as if everything depended on this,
groping blindly down a page,
like someone lost in a forest.
―Billy Collins, from "Foundling"

Most often, I begin with a sense of affinity or curiosity about a poet’s work, but other times I may find myself reading a poem I don’t necessarily care for, and yet the very fact that it spurs resistance can stimulate my imagination. Almost any kind of reading can incite a response, and that is all you need to begin.
―Holly Wren Spaulding

Reading other poetry will often be very inspiring for me, help me figure solutions
to problems I didn't know I had.
―Anne Rankin

The romantic fallacy that the first thing that comes into your head is the divine afflatus is the enemy of art.
   Once on paper, swirling thoughts become concrete artifacts, so do not turn that into an idol, worshipping your own imagined cleverness (Been there, done that!).
   Manuscripts in the British Museum show that even the sublime Keats savagely revised. Write it, print it, put it in a drawer. Take it out after a few days (or even weeks if the content is personally upsetting). Read it as someone else might. Does it make sense? Does it convey what you want to say or are you just talking to yourself?

    Like iffy things in the fridge, when in doubt, throw it out. Keep what’s good and make a meal from that. You must turn your vision outwards so that readers can see it too.
―Anne Redmon

Could a greater miracle exist than for us to look through each other’s eyes for a moment?
―Henry David Thoreau

I have no fancy idea about poetry. It's not like embroidery or painting or silk. It doesn't come to you on the wings of a dove. It's something you have to work hard at.

―Louise Bogan

Poetry makes people nervous until they're engaged in it. That's when they realize it's what they needed to hear.
―Stuart Kestenbaum 

It is wonderful to just know the importance of lying in the sun.

―Margaret Wise Brown

[Literature] is for me one of the chief means through which the experience of violence can be told in ways that defy both the discourse of politicians and the defenses of thought.
―Jacqueline Rose

I have no perspective on what I am doing. I write a song and think, ‘Where does this come from?’ Me? I wrote this? I write fiction … I’m just enjoying myself, throwing lines together. I think it always reflects your own experience and feelings, but it isn’t always in a way that’s clear. If you find something honest enough in yourself then it will be universal.

―Richard Thompson

Every worthwhile book contains many faults, and every worthwhile writer commits them.
―Eric Partridge

There’s nothing more embarrassing than being a poet, really.
―Elizabeth Bishop

Nobody is asking you to do what you are doing. There are more than enough novels in the world, and nobody is more painfully aware of that than the person attempting to write one. To dig a book out of the ground can be backbreaking, hand-tearing work; you need to forget what you are doing, to fall into a trance, and when the spell breaks, you can’t be entirely sure what you’ve unearthed, where it came from or who will recognize it as belonging to them, too. And however much of what results is pure invention (or so you think), your subjectivity is all you have. You made it up. It’s made of you.
―Jessica Winter

You cannot drink poetry.
―Natalie Diaz

The best writing is what's right in front of you. Sometimes I'd walk down the street with poets and they wouldn't see anything. I'd have to shake their arm and say, "Look! Look!"
―Lawrence Ferlinghetti

I don't think I have a secret as such, except I suppose you could say that I'm not very easily discouraged.
—Margaret Atwood, in AARP newsletter, in answer to a question about the "secret" of her productivity and success

I’ve come to believe that in order to matter, poems must be both entertaining and useful—entertaining by being rooted in the human traditions of telling stories and making music; useful by disturbing our lives enough to reinforce our humanness. These are the kinds of poems I endeavor to write.
—Andrea Hollander

Without minute neatness of execution, the sublime cannot exist! Grandeur of ideas is founded on precision of ideas.
—William Blake

The greatest thing she ever said to me was in 1943 after the opening of Oklahoma!, when I suddenly had unexpected, flamboyant success for a work I thought was only fairly good, after years of neglect for work I thought was fine. I was bewildered and worried that my entire scale of values was untrustworthy. I talked to Martha [Graham]. I remember the conversation well. It was in a Schrafft’s restaurant over a soda. I confessed that I had a burning desire to be excellent but no faith that I could be. Martha said to me, very quietly, "There is a vitality, a life force, an energy, a quickening that is translated through you into action, and because there is only one of you in all of time, this expression is unique. And if you block it, it will never exist through any other medium and it will be lost. The world will not have it. It is not your business to determine how good it is nor how valuable nor how it compares with other expressions. It is your business to keep it yours clearly and directly, to keep the channel open. You do not even have to believe in yourself or your work. You have to keep yourself open and aware to the urges that motivate you. Keep the channel open. As for you, Agnes, you have a peculiar and unusual gift, and you have so far used about one-third of your talent."
"But," I said, "when I see my work I take for granted what other people value in it. I see only its ineptitude, inorganic flaws, and crudities. I am not pleased or satisfied."
"No artist is pleased."
"But then there is no satisfaction?"
"No satisfaction whatever at any time,” she cried out passionately. "There is only a queer divine dissatisfaction, a blessed unrest that keeps us marching and makes us more alive than the others."
—Agnes de Mille

"Listen carefully to first criticisms made of your work," he advised writers and artists. "Note just what it is about your work that critics don't like — then cultivate it. That's the only part of your work that's individual and worth keeping."
—Jean Cocteau

I didn’t realize the importance of having engaged in a lifelong relationship with poetry until I needed it to survive. It’s an instrument, a companion instrument that nobody can take away from you. It’s also a form of insulation from the wasteland of the world where you can go when you need a break or a place to quietly contemplate and study the common absurdities of human experience. Every day, we face a wasteland. Sometimes, it’s an aggressive boss, an angry driver, a public or private injustice of some sort. Other times it’s a rampant disease altering our environment for an extended period of time. Whatever the case, poetry is there like a garden, welcoming us with its eternal shade and warmth and wisdom.
—Alejandro Escudé

     "I thought about something you said. That I should write a book."
     "I believe I more noted how everybody’s doing it," V says. "If Virginia Clay can write a book, anybody can. The main qualification appears to be an ability to sit at a desk for many hours a day."
—Charles Frazier, Varina

If my house were haunted, I would toss buckets of flour into the places where a ghost might hide. Eventually, the flour would find its mark, and the ghost would be given a form. When I write, I often begin with only a sense that something is there—a presence of some kind. I start throwing words around. With a little luck, they hit their subject and a poem appears. I’m always shocked by what they look like.
—Martin Vest

Tenacity is surely part of any poet's job description.

—Kathryn Kirkpatrick

Poetry is not a means to an end, but a continuing engagement with being alive.

—Kim Addonizio

You arrive to each poem, each era of yourself different than you did the last. I write when I feel called to language. When I haven’t felt called for a while, I show up anyway to see what happens. I used to write every day. Not anymore. I try to touch words, mine or others, every day. That’s often books and poems and interviews. Sometimes it’s writing, sometimes reading, sometimes editing, sometimes listening. As long as I am actively living in or alongside language, I think I am in process. Sometimes the task at hand is to live, to witness. Sometimes “the work” looks like getting the rest of your house in order so you can focus on the writing at hand. Sometimes “the work” is rest. It’s all about learning to pay attention to yourself, your own wants and needs, your own definitions of discipline and exploration. What I mean is: I don’t always have momentum. No one is always inspired. But I have invited words into my life. I pay them mind even when I feel stuff and grey, and even when I don’t have the time for words, I trust that they will forgive me when I return.

—Danez Smith, January 2020

If you’re paying attention to the world,...if you’re a part of it and empathy is in your work, which it should be, then artists just need to do the work. Don’t be silent, speak up and write things that scare them and question their beliefs. Continue to be artists.
—Tyree Daye

It is a dark, dangerous and exciting time to be alive, but “stay-at-home” is not very different from a writer’s regular life.
—Annie Proulx

Resist any temptation to use the poem to make its readers like you, or admire you, or forgive you.

—Ellen Bryant Voigt

I tell people, especially if I’m giving a reading, it’s okay to let the words wash over them, the way one experiences abstract art. I’m not trained in visual art. I often see things in a museum and don’t know what to make of them, but I still have an experience, a response to what I can see. Likewise, I don’t think poems have to have easy translation. I believe strongly in emotional and psychological narratives. I think of many of my poems as emotional gestures. Context isn’t always essential—or maybe it’s that I resist context as an absolute. I like what happens when context begins to wobble a bit.

—Carl Phillips, The Art of Poetry No. 103

As you have seen, I am a writer who came of a sheltered life. A sheltered life can be a daring life as well. For all serious daring starts from within.
―Eudora Welty, One Writer’s Beginnings

It is necessary to write, if the days are not to slip emptily by. How else, indeed, to clap the net over the butterfly of the moment?

―Vita Sackville-West

Some moments I sense that I am in alignment with those who have perfected their art when they were living. I am working alongside them. And some days I feel utterly alone and back in the muck. That is the human condition. No matter where we are in the process, it's important to keep going in the best possible manner, and bump up against the edge of unknowing.
―Joy Harjo, One Song

Somewhere, in each poet's heart who picks up their pen and attempts to climb the oddest art of all, one that is at times the most unseen, there lies the belief that this art can be mighty. There's some hope in it, as odd as poetry is. If it can't change a nation, maybe it might change one soul.

―Spencer Reece, in ​American Poetry Review

[Ahmet] Altan recognizes that to beat back the horrors of power intent on enslaving us all, bravery needs to come from readers, as well. In order to save their own lives, they must choose to seek out the best, the most important, the most truthful writing whether it’s journalism or fiction.
"Each eye that reads what I have written, each voice that repeats my name holds my hand like a little cloud and flies me over the lowlands."
Thus, with such readers in mind, this author wrote from his cage:
"You can imprison me but you cannot keep me here. Because like all writers, I have magic. I can pass through your walls with ease."
―James Grady, Washington Post, reviewing I Will Never See the World Again​ by Ahmet Altan

Everything in life is writable about if you have the outgoing guts to do it, and the imagination to improvise. The worst enemy to creativity is self-doubt.
―Sylvia Plath

Good poems travel in ways that are, strongly or subtly, meandering, askew, counter, extravagant, peculiar, free, and freeing. Their pelts are freckled. They loosen the map lines of the literal, underslip narrowness, and let us see more than would be possible by looking at things directly. They are raids on reality that allow raids on the heart. They are lies whose intention is truth exposed more fully.

― Jane Hirschfield

Writing is an embrace, a being embraced. Every idea is an idea reaching out.

― Susan Sontag

Publishing a book is like stuffing a note into a bottle and hurling it into the sea. Some bottles drown, some come safe to land, where the notes are read and then possibly cherished, or else misinterpreted, or else understood all too well by those who hate the message. You never know who your readers might be.
― Margaret Atwood 

Stephen Dunn: The poetry that ends up mattering speaks to things we half-know but are inarticulate about. It gives us language and the music of language for what we didn’t know we knew. So a combination of insight and beauty. I also liken the writing of it to basketball—you discover that you can be better than yourself for a little while. If you’re writing a good poem, it means you’re discovering things that you didn’t know you knew. In basketball, if you’re hitting your shots, you feel in the realm of the magical.

Timothy Green: Do you think that writing is that same feeling as being 'in the zone'?

Dunn: Yes. But then, almost always, you have to revise.

—Interview, February 18, 2018

​

What is left unsaid, and the expanse of quiet that surrounds it, is just as important—sometimes more important—than what is said. This is true in poetry, and in life. Poets pay attention to, and understand, blank space.

—E. Ce Miller

When I am stuck in the perfection cog—as in, I am rewriting a sentence a million times over even though I’m in a first draft or, I am freaking out and can’t move forward because I am not sure how everything is going to fit together—I find it helpful to tell myself:

You will fail.

I have this written on a Post-it note. It might sound discouraging, but I find it very liberating. The idea is that no matter what I do, the draft is going to be flawed, so I might as well just have at it. I also like to look at pictures I’ve taken of all the many drafts that go into my books as they become books, which helps me remember that so much of what I am writing now will later change. When I am aware that my work is not as brave or true as it needs to be, I like to look at a particular photograph of myself as a child. I am about eight, sitting on a daybed in cut-off shorts, with a book next to me. I’m looking at the camera with great confidence, and an utter lack of self-consciousness. This photograph reminds me of who I am at my essence, and frees me up to write more like her.”
—Anna Solomon, author of Leaving Lucy Pear, in ​Poets & Writers

Who better to sound the alarm about impending ecological doom than this widely read poet-naturalist-lover of the world who has immersed and invested herself in soil, seashore, forest, and wetland her whole life? It is a reasonable question, but one which I think [Mary] Oliver answers in the way that an artist must. The worst kind of poetry is preachy and argumentative. Oliver invites the reader into wonder, into the harvest of presence, so that in forgetting ourselves for a moment and attending, say, to the 'trim and feistiness' of a single green moth, we might possibly (there are no guarantees, such is the risk art takes) be initiated into a practice, a form of wisdom, a way of life, whereby in time we might come to care passionately, purposefully, about more of our neighbors, human and nonhuman, with whom we share this one world.”
—Debra Dean Murphy, "Why we need Mary Oliver’s poems," April 13, 2017

Form at its best provokes creativity.
—Dan Albergotti

Any writer, I suppose, feels that the world into which he was born is nothing less than a conspiracy against the cultivation of his talent—which attitude certainly has a great deal to support it. On the other hand, it is only because the world looks on his talent with such a frightening indifference that the artist is compelled to make his talent important. So that any writer, looking back over even so short a span of time as I am here forced to assess, finds that the things which hurt him and the things which helped him cannot be divorced from each other; he could be helped in a certain way only because he was hurt in a certain way; and his help is simply to be enabled to move from one conundrum to the next—one is tempted to say that he moves from one disaster to the next.
—James Baldwin, Autobiographical Notes 

Faith and hope, yes. Charity, no. At least not toward your own material. When you see little spots on the cabbage, throw it out. Ruthlessness, like charity, begins at home. This is a hard one to learn. Robert Lowell was a great writing teacher because he wasn't shy about telling people hard truths about their own poems. Of a seventeen line effort: "I think this is a marvelous poem. Cut the first sixteen lines and go from there."
—Stanley Plumly

Out of the quarrel with others we make rhetoric; out of the quarrel with ourselves we make poetry.
—William Butler Yeats

Patience is a difficult thing in our world driven by speed. As writers, we never know how the work will come into bloom. Some poems and even books seem to pop open immediately, while others have to unfurl slowly, the petals so tightly wrapped that they have to fill their veins like a butterfly coming from the chrysalis.
—Valerie Nieman

If the book is true, it will find an audience that is meant to read it.
—Wally Lamb

If you're a writer, or a creative person, there will be times when you feel it would be wiser to stop, to give up on making poems, or photos, or clay pots, or paintings. Things start to build up. Manuscripts, pots, photo files, stretchers. Maybe no one wants them, or you've hit a wall, or you've been badly reviewed or rejected. (I just might be speaking from experience). But I'm here to tell you, you should continue. 

In a book of conversations with the poet Li-Young Lee, called Breaking the Alabaster Jar, he talks at one point about the mandalas that are made by Tibetan monks from coloured sand. How when the mandala is done and after it’s looked at for a day or two, the monks dump the sand into a river. This act isn't accompanied by any feelings of loss or sadness.

Because: it’s the making of the thing that matters. How that changes you.
—Shawna Lemay

For me, poetry is an escape. No matter what the subject matter, I think there’s something inspiring and powerful in how the poet shapes the words and delivers the emotion. I try to always read poems on my lunch break for the small shivers of wonder and beauty they give me in the middle of the day. For me, poetry lives between the hum of ordinary moments, providing a spark that lifts us momentarily to something greater. And the best poems I read, the poems I try and fail over and over again to write, embed that spark so deep it stays with you for hours and days and years afterward (think Charles Wright, think Vievee Francis). Enjoy all these poems as you would your favorite snack: cheese and crackers, apple slices, vegetables dunked in ranch. And then smile! Because whoever you are, you’re really great, and I appreciate you reading. Now go be awesome.
—Kirk Schlueter

The open mic afterwards went well.  I read the scene “The Walmart Way” from The Pursuit of Happiness.  There were no “amens,” “hallelujahs,” or “preach it, brothers” —but I did get one laugh which felt very nice.
—Tony Roberts

Obscurantism is more than a desperate attempt to feign novelty, though. It’s also a tactic for badgering readers into deference to the writer’s authority. Nobody can be sure they are comprehending the author’s meaning, which has the effect of making the reader feel deeply inferior and in awe of the writer’s towering knowledge, knowledge that must exist on a level so much higher than that of ordinary mortals that we are incapable of even beginning to appreciate it.....The harder people have to work to figure out what you’re saying, the more accomplished they’ll feel when they figure it out, and the more sophisticated you will appear. Everybody wins.
—Nathan J. Robinson (on Jordan Peterson) in ​Current Affairs

Authenticity is the journey of figuring out who you are through what you make.
—Donald Glover in The New Yorker

You have to be open enough to hear the universe’s stage directions.

—RuPaul

The more time I spend with poetry, the less certain I am of anything I say about it. I’ll admit that as a reader I tend to favor clarity over innovation, beauty over authenticity, and feeling over moral rectitude. As a writer I just try to write poems I would want to read. But even these inclinations I grow daily less sure of.
—Matthew Buckley Smith in ​Rattle

I get a lot of inspiration from just going out and pretending I’ve never been to this planet before. It’s a great way to remember just how absurd, strange, beautiful, and unlikely everything is around you. If I can stay in that childish frame of mind, in that place of possibility where you watch somebody get into an elevator, the doors close, then open again and five people come out, and it occurs to you, ‘That’s where you go to become five people!’ Or you cut your hair and more grows out, and you cut your hair and more grows out, and you deduce, ‘The human head must be packed with hair.’ If I can practice daily astonishment, I find that I’m a little more pleasant, patient, and forgiving.

​—Brendan Constantine

I write for hours on end every day. The layers of words have given me

a thick veneer, but few poems.
—Heather Lore

The age is materialistic. Verse isn't.

—​Paul Laurence Dunbar

The people in the world, and the objects in it, and the world as a whole, are not absolute things, but on the contrary, are the phenomena of perception.... If we were all alike: if we were millions of people saying do, re, mi, in unison, one poet would be enough... But we are not alone, and everything needs expounding all the time because, as people live and die, each one perceiving life and death for himself, and mostly by and in himself, there develops a curiosity about the perceptions of others. This is what makes it possible to go on saying new things about old things.
—​Wallace Stevens, "A Note on Samuel French Morse"

Literacy about where you're standing is the key to great writing.

—​Hannah Palmer, author of Flight Path

Subject is to poetry what
plot is to fiction: gasoline,
to get started, to get around.
—Chris Kingsley

Writing poems is not a career but a lifetime of looking into, and listening to, how words see.
—Philip Booth

I’m not a formalist, per se, but I tend toward narrative. I believe in the self, and I believe in meaning. And I believe that poetry is instrumental in the process of effecting and uniting both the self and meaning. In other words, I’m a square, one who hasn’t always enjoyed American poetry’s last decade or so, what with its flarfing and skitteriness; I have been, however, encouraged to see poetry turn away from that dismissive, too-cool-for-school irony and back toward the self, experience, and attempted understanding.
—James Davis May, reviewing Chen Chen's book, When I Grow up I Want to Be a List of Further Possibilities

An important moment for [James] Baldwin came when he and his friend, the modernist painter Beauford Delaney, were standing on a street corner in the Village, waiting for the light to change. Baldwin recounts in The Paris Review that Beauford "pointed down and said, 'Look.' I looked and all I saw was water. And he said, 'Look again,' which I did, and I saw oil on the water and the city reflected in that puddle." In that moment, Baldwin felt he'd been taught how to see, and how to trust what he saw, felt that from that moment on he could see the world differently than he had before.
—The Writer's Almanac

Listen to your own poem..., hear what the poem wants to do rather than impose that shape. You can recognize the steps of its particular ritual. Does it want to be a dissolving loop? Does it want a couplet at the end as a way to get a rim shot? so how does it want to move, and, deeper, what does it want to say? So that means this kind of strange ouija board participation that's not completely coming from the brain....
—Bruce Smith in The American Poetry Review

To create one's world in any of the arts takes courage.
—Georgia O'Keeffe

The experience of the power of poetry comes before we can name it; no wonder writers are originally and eternally ferocious readers. As a reader of poems, I can feel the power of another person’s dreaming, and there is a great delight and fascination for me in feeling the form of the poet’s dreaming, in all its urgency and intelligence. The immersion in this process—sensing a voice emerging from private dreaming and out into formal clarity—is one of the great pleasures of my life, whether I am the reader or the writer of the poem. As a teacher, I hope to help a writer make his or her poem a true experience on the page: to figure out how to give an inner world, and one’s senses of the outer one, dynamic form. 
—Sandra Lim

Be a good steward of your gifts. Protect your time. Feed your inner life. Avoid too much noise. Read good books, have good sentences in your ears. Be by yourself as often as you can. Walk. Take the phone off the hook. Work regular hours.
—Jane Kenyon ​​

​As for the reputed attentiveness of writers, people imagine that artists are sensitive and “more present,” or more “in their senses” than other people, but in my experience, this is simply not true. I knew a writer once who stayed in his room all day, smoking cigarettes and eating Cheetos; but if you read his poems, you would swear that he was walking through the woods of Tennessee, harvesting chicory and dandelion, recording the plumage of the snowy egret and the cry of the whippoorwill. He had the gift of conjuring attentiveness. It’s a paradox. The practice of language ironically draws you into contact with the world. It teaches you how to see, and it also makes your seeing more inventive.
—Tony Hoagland, Writer's Almanac interview

TOP 10 THINGS I WISH SOMEONE HAD SAID TO ME ALONG THE WAY 
1. Buy a journal -- a nice one, so nice you want to write in it even on days you don’t feel like writing.
2. Write in your journal -- every day.  Make it a routine if you can.  Keep it by your seat in the car, by your bed at night. Take it to the bathroom with you.  Take it into restaurants. Use emergency lanes.  Interrupt people and tell them to wait a moment while you write something down.
3. Revise what you write.  Seek criticism.  Work at it until it feels completely right.  When it comes back rejected, revise it again.  When it comes back published, revise it again.  When it comes out in a book of your own, revise it again.  When you prepare to read it in public, revise it again.  After you read it in public, revise it again.
4. Read more than you write.  Subscribe to at least 6 journals publishing your genre, including at least one biggie and one local.  Biggies:  Ploughshares, Granta, Prairie Schooner, Paris Review, Poetry, Glimmer Train.  Locals:  Main Street Rag, Tar River Poetry, Greensboro Review, Wild Goose, Dead Mule. Buy at least 1 new book in your genre each month.
5. Network.  Join a writers’ group.  Go to readings.  Take classes.  North Carolina Writers’ Network. North Carolina Poetry Society. Poetry Society of South Carolina. Associated Writing Programs. Academy of American Poets. Poetry Hickory & Writers’ Night Out.  When you’re ready to publish, start local with networked leads.
6. Buy a book of “prompts” for the days when you feel like you have nothing to write about.  Gardner’s The Art of Fiction, Gutkind’s The Art of Creative Nonfiction, Goldberg’s Writing Down the Bones, Behn and Twichell’s The Practice of Poetry. Figure out which techniques take you from “seed” to “fruit,” and keep them in your back pocket.
7. Balance your life. Save time for family, for doing what you have to do, and for doing the other things you love. These are usually the best sources for material anyway.  Work 8 hours; sleep 8 hours; family/chores/other 6 hours; read 1 hour; write 1 hour.
8. Occasionally ask yourself what you’re doing and why you’re doing it. Don’t feel you have to keep those answers forever. They should change as you do, but it’s still good to think about it from time to time.
9. Never be rude to a publisher. Be familiar with the journal or press before submitting. Use Duotrope, Poets & Writers, and “The Chronicle.” Most of all, read the journal itself.
10. Never stop being amazed that we exist at all.  Never stop demanding that we make it better.​

—Scott Owens

This is our goal as writers, I think; to help others have this sense of—please forgive me—wonder, of seeing things anew, things that can catch us off guard, that break in on our small, bordered worlds.
—Anne Lamott, Bird by Bird

Don't run, go slowly,
it is only to yourself that you have to go!

Go slowly, don't run,
for the child of yourself, just born
and eternal
cannot follow you.

​—Juan Ramon Jimenez

I cannot say too many times how powerful the techniques of line length and line breaks are. You cannot swing the lines around, or fling strong-sounding words, or scatter soft ones, to no purpose. A reader beginning a poem is like someone stepping into a rowboat with a stranger at the oars; the first few draws on the long oars through the deep water tell a lot—is one safe, or is one apt to be soon drowned? A poem is that real a journey.
—Mary Oliver

Crunch it down and pump it up.

—Dorianne Laux

Once upon a time there was a six-foot-tall woman with blue hair and a sense of smallness. In her house was a teacup saying ‘girl, you got this!’ and on her wall was a kitten hanging from a clothesline. The kitten’s word balloon said something like, ‘Hang in there!’ or ‘Don’t let go!’ Always something with an exclamation mark. Isn’t that the moral of the story, always? There is always a small woman, hiding her grandness, trying to fill up on uplifting wordplay. But today, this small woman sits down and writes a poem in which she details her smallness and why she came to be that way. Another small woman reads it, and from the tip of her hair a fire starts, but just as quickly dies. Isn’t that why we are here? To write another poem for a small woman to read, and then another. Until the amount of sparks are too much for the quick extinguishing, and she is a woman on fire, exploding into the world.

—Heather Bell

I would argue that good poems and stories require and develop in reader and writer alike an imaginative thinking that crosses the very racial ethnic political differences that everywhere else on the planet are hardening into unassailable orthodoxies.What after all are racism and bigotry of any kind but a failure of imagination?...Good poems and stories are themselves instances or enactments of the human image at its most inclusive, insightful, and empathetic. They are not an evasion of politics, or a retreat from a defiled and brutal world, but a passionate form of imaginative engagement and resistance. The literary arts urge us not to ignore what’s been happening to our democracy but to rectify the damage done to it by celebrating the qualities of mind and heart that refuse to reduce the human figure to deadening abstractions, or replace the truth of experience with palatable lies.

—Alan Shapiro, New Bern, November 11, 2016

I like poems that embody experience instead of merely referring to experience; that enact among...lines and sentences an arc of feeling or an arc of action instead of merely stating what a speaker feels or does. I like sentences, in particular, that dramatize or vocalize an emotional or psychological dynamic.
 —Alan Shapiro

He advised me to wait, to hold true
To my vision, to speak in my own voice
To say the thing straight out
There was the whole day about him

The greatest thing, he said, was presence
to be yourself in your own time, to stand up
That poetry was precision, raw precision
Truth and compassion: genius

I had hardly begun. I asked, How did you begin
He said, I began in a tree in Lucerne
In a machine shop, in an open field
Start anywhere

He said If you don't write, it won't
Get written. No tricks. No magic
About it.
—Dorianne Laux, from "Mine Own Phil Levine"

I think the main thing is to believe in yourself. Make sure you face the page with some discipline. Once you do that you may find the words finding themselves and you are following them, as your story or poem or essay makes. What I'm trying to say is that everyone is different. The thing to do is DO it. And the vulnerable places, the subjects you think you cannot write about, the whole matter of not having anything to say, perhaps—well, please know you will feel better if you just let go and try, let the syllables find you. See what happens.

—Shelby Stephenson

If the editor is sleepy, exhausted, really unable to focus, that turns out to be a good time to read the inbox. All the poems blur together into a big indistinguishable lump. He reads for an hour and nothing happens. Then with eyes half-open he clicks to a poem that begins with a voice so arresting that the editor feels a sudden rush of adrenaline. This is one way he might recognize a TRP poem. That's not facetious. When you receive 1,573 poems in 28 days, you are looking to be jolted awake.
—Luke Whisnant, "Perusing the Inbox: In Search of a Tar River Poetry Poem," in Shining Rock Poetry Anthology and Book Review

The most exhilarating, and therefore treacherous, moment in a poem's composition comes when the first draft is done. The poet, relieved of an emotional burden, exalted by self-expression, feels that the world should share the triumph....It is sobering to realize, upon subsequent readings, that more work needs to be done. The work includes leaving the poem alone. No rules exist for how long the poet must stop fiddling with the thing to let it seal over and form a crust, enabling further breakthroughs. Even for those rare, magical poems that keep their original form, a stage of waiting in the dark is essential—as it is for every living thing."
—Susan Snively, "Waiting and Silence," in The Practice of Poetry

As one who works with young people every day, I do not wish to encourage any more solipsism, but I do want to help them be heard over the maddening and toxic white noise of the culture in which they are drowning. I take it on faith that they must find their voice in order to lose it. Those who listen carefully to their own voice and read assiduously to study the skilled voices of others will grow into riper understanding of the craft. Noxious, obnoxious, and precious grow up together at first; the wheat and the tares will be separated at the harvest.
—David E. Poston, letter to the editor, Poetry, 2005

Words create the world. It can look so different depending on how you describe that sky and that light. It can either be really threatening, or neutral, or it can be beautiful. It can move between those things so fast. It can be lonely, it can look like a Hopper painting, or it can look like a warm sunset. Mood can shift like drr-drr-drr-drr! We have so much power, so language is how it gets built. So that’s why Trump, who’s tone deaf, is building something really alien, and very frightening, so … Oh god, I hope he doesn’t win.
—Laurie Anderson, interview, The Atlantic, June 1, 2016

Since poetry deals with the singular, not the general, it cannot—if it is good poetry—look at things of this earth other than as colorful, variegated, and exciting, and so, it cannot reduce, life, with all its pain, horror, suffering, and ecstasy, to a unified tonality of boredom or complaint. By necessity poetry is therefore on the side of being and against nothingness....The secret of all art, also of poetry is...distance....Remembering, we move to that land of past time, yet without our former passions: we do not strive for anything, we are not afraid of anything, we become an eye which perceives and finds details that had escaped our attention.

—Czeslaw Milosz, introduction to A Book of Luminous Things

In a lifetime of walking in the woods, plains, gullies, mountains, I have found that the body has no more vulnerable sense than being lost. . . . It’s happened often enough that I don’t feel panic. I feel absolutely vulnerable and recognize it’s the best state of mind for a writer whether in the woods or the studio. Your mind feels a rush of images and ideas. You have acquired humility by accident. Feeling bright-eyed, confident and arrogant doesn’t do this job unless you’re writing the memoir of a narcissist. You are far better off being lost in your work and writing over your head. You don’t know where you are as a point of view unless you go beyond yourself.
—Jim Harrison, The Ancient Minstrel

It always comes back to the same necessity: go deep enough and there is a bedrock of truth, however hard.
—May Sarton

Poetry is a place for grief to go.
—Jaki Shelton Green

What moves you most in a work of literature?
What moves me is, I think, the trifecta of memory, love and the passage of time. The close observation of character, of the moment as it passes — suffused with love. The writer who says: Here I stood! I loved the world enough to write it all down.
—Sarah Ruhl, interview, New York Times Book Review, February 2016.

Why do you never find anything written about that idiosyncratic thought you advert to, about your fascination with something no one else understands? Because it is up to you. There is something you find interesting, for a reason hard to explain because you have never read it on any page; there you begin. You were made and set here to give voice to this, your own astonishment.
—Annie Dillard, The Abundance

In my civilization it's customary to describe poetry as discarded, almost moribund, an all-too-exclusive art form, without power to break through…. I think it is time to emphasize that poetry—in spite of all the bad poets and bad readers—starts from an advantageous position.
A piece of paper, some words: it's simple and practical. It gives independence. Poetry requires
no heavy, vulnerable apparatus that has to be lugged around, it isn't dependent on temperamental performers, dictatorial directors, bright producers with irresistible ideas. No big money is at stake. A poem doesn't come in one copy that somebody buys and locks up in a storeroom waiting for its market value to go up; it can't be stolen from a museum or become currency in the buying and selling of narcotics, or get burned up by a vandal. When I started writing, at 16, I had a couple of like-minded school friends. Sometimes, when the lessons seemed more than usually trying, we would pass notes to each other between our desks—poems and aphorisms, which would come back with the more or less enthusiastic comments of the recipient. What an impression those scribblings would make! There is the fundamental situation of poetry. The lesson of official life goes rumbling on. We send inspired notes to one another.
—Tomas Tranströmer. Translated by Judith Moffett. from "Answer to Uj Iras." Ironwood 13 (1979): 38-9. (Thanks to poet David Graham.)

For last year's words belong to last year's language
And next year's words await another voice.
And to make an end is to make a beginning.
—T.S. Eliot, "Little Gidding"

Inspiration is fleeting. Technique is eternal.
—Keith Flynn, The Rhythm Method, Razzmatazz, and Memory

If you poured water on a great poem, you would get a novel.
—Gloria Steinem, in The New York Times Review of Books

Whenever I'm stuck when I'm writing, I can just put a Smiths record on and, it's kind of like if my songwriting was like an iPhone, it recharges it in five minutes. It's because there's all these question marks in it; it's very foreign to me and it's always going to make me want to go and play guitar.
—Ryan Adams, in Rolling Stone

Rewriting establishes the palimpsest and permits you to stay in touch with the first cause of the poem, regardless of the number of erasures, writings-over, transformations: the first impulse is the secret that will be revealed the more it is concealed through rewrite.
—Stanley Plumly

At 100 years old, I look up and say, ‘If anyone is listening, thank you for another nice day!’ In poetry I boil things down to an essence. Rather than pages and pages of rambling. I like that.
—Fred Fox

Purity is not my claim, my game, nor a thing remotely within my grasp. I’m an American; this tarnished software will not be rectified by good intentions, or even good behavior. The poet plays with the devil; that is, she or he traffics in repressed energies. The poet’s job is elasticity, mobility of perspective, trouble-making, clowning and truth-telling.
—Tony Hoagland, 2011

Despite the literary fashion, you have to be attuned to your own ear, your own gifts. The whole justification for form is that it helps to inform and orchestrate what is being said. A good poet is never one coerced by form, but a good poet needs to have turns, climaxes, joints—or he's left floundering in infinity.

—Richard Wilbur, interview, The Light Within the Light by Jeanne Braham

Poets in any culture inherit a common tradition. What makes them separate and distinctive is the use they make of their own past, which cannot be the same as anybody else's. My first sense of what it meant to be a poet in the modern world was that it required a search for my own identity....Sometimes I feel perturbed that I've written so few poems on political themes, particularly on the causes that agitate me. But then I realize being a poet at all in the modern world is a political act.

—Stanley Kunitz, interview, The Light Within the Light by Jeanne Braham

Be careful who your critics are. Be specific. Tell almost the whole story. Put your ear close down to your soul and listen hard.
—Anne Sexton, interview, Paris Review

O thou whose face hath felt the Winter's wind,

Whose eye has seen the snow-clouds hung in mist,

And the black elm-tops 'mong the freezing stars,

To thee the Spring will be a harvest-time.

O thou, whose only book has been the light

Of supreme darkness, which thou feddest on

Night after night, when Phoebus was away,

To thee the Spring shall be a triple morn.

O fret not after knowledge—I have none,
And yet my song comes native with the warmth.
O fret not after knowledge—I have none,
And yet the evening listens. He who saddens
At thought of idleness cannot be idle,
And he's awake who thinks himself asleep.
—John Keats, "What the Thrush Said"

Work finally begins when the fear of doing nothing exceeds the fear of doing it badly.

—Alain de Botton

Those youthful days when time management was distinctly less important than it is to me now are over, never to return, and I finally understand that the perfect conditions will probably never arise. To feel the way I do about writing and to end up arranging my life around anything else, or to allow my life to become arranged around anything else, would be a personal betrayal, so I am resolved to power on. I must struggle through and against, and I must overcome Life. It’s three-yards-and-a-cloud-of-dust for me, and I’ve never felt more like a writer.

—Dan Kennard, Tahoma Literary Review

Nothing brings talent to near to genius as the very qualities that genius can do without: restraint, discrimination, self-criticism.

—Edith Wharton, "Donnée Book II"

Based on your experience as an editor, what have you learned about writing?
So much is about process. Read. Read. Read. Read. Read.

—Maura Snell, co-founder, The Tishman Review

Our focus [as American writers] on exercises, on forming good writing habits by trying to write every day, and our insistence on reading, seemed a little lacking in mystery, if not downright square, in comparison to what Naseer Hassan and Hamed al-Maliki were proposing as primary qualities for being a writer: the Rilkean attributes of vision, inspiration, and the ability to express profound feeling.

—Tom Sleigh, “Six Trees and Two White Dogs…Doves?,” Poetry, March 2015

The mystery will be expressed simply or it won't be expressed.

—Thomas Mann

Great writing is the product of spiritual progress.

—Jay Parini, Boston Globe, September 17, 1995

And the music becomes an act of reparation, a security guaranteed, and archaic anxieties are stilled by their incorporation into the formal beauty of the piece.

—Frank Kermode, "The Wonder of Mozart," NY Review of Books, October 19, 1995

Jump the chasm rather than staying with what you know.

—Merce Cunningham

And poetry, too, begins in this way: the crossing of trajectories of two (or more) elements that might not otherwise have known simultaneity. When this happens, a piece of the universe is revealed as if for the first time.

—Adrienne Rich, What Is Found There

When a poet's mind is perfectly equipped for its work, it is constantly amalgamating disparate experience; the ordinary man's experience is chaotic, irregular, fragmentary. The latter falls in love, or reads Spinoza, and these two experiences have nothing to do with each other, or with the noise of the typewriter or the smell of cooking; in the mind of the poet these experiences are always forming new wholes.

—T.S. Eliot, "The Metaphysical Poets"

The insignificant 'image' may be 'evoked' never so ably and still mean nothing.

—William Carlos Williams, Spring and All

If the Reason be stimulated to more earnest vision, outlines and surfaces become transparent, and are no longer seen; causes and spirits are seen through them. The best moments of life are these delicious awakenings of the higher powers.

—Ralph Waldo Emerson, "Nature"

Joy in looking and comprehending is nature's most beautiful gift.

—Albert Einstein

...what writers are for: Throughout history, they've been the gatekeepers between raw data and complex understanding. Too often trapped these days before the brilliant glow of computer screens that reveal everything we need to know but not what to do with it, we risk losing the art of synthesis—of hearing the world around us and translating those sounds into the myriad sensible narratives that make up reality. The splintering of consciousness has also become a flattening: traveling widely but two-dimensionally, without the benefit of the information sensors of the natural world.

—Gail Caldwell, Boston Globe

The poet doesn't invent. He listens.

—Jean Cocteau

Everyone can draw. Not everyone can see. I can teach you to see.

—Arno Maris

A poem is a portrait of consciousness....Poetry is written for others. But it's also a study of the self, which is a private kind of work.

—Chase Twichell, "Toys in the Attic"

The poetries of men and women unlike you are a great polyglot city of resources, in whose streets you need to wander whose sounds you need to listen to, without feeling you must live there.

—Adrienne Rich, What Is Found There

The real writer is one
who really writes. Talent
is an invention like phlogiston
after the fact of fire.
Work is its own cure. You have to
like it better than being loved.
—Marge Piercy, from “For the young who want to"