You must be careful not to deprive the poem of its wild origin. Stanley Kunitz.

We've all led raucous lives,/ some of them inside, some of them out./ But only the poem you leave behind is what's important. Charles Wright (from 'Littlefoot')

Language is remarkable in that, except under the extreme constraints of mathematics and logic, it never can talk only about what it's supposed to talk about. Howard Nemerov

Her poems are voyages of discovery. Literally. Over and over she writes about the journeys, physical and metaphysical, that are transformative experiences - Sarah Maguire, Poetry Review

some pure thing, / Some living source, half-imagined and half-real, / Pulses in the fictive water that I feel. - John Montague, 'The Water Carrier'

Pain is filtered in a poem so that it becomes finally, in the end, pleasure. Mark Strand

I suppose as I'm explaining myself to others, I'm quintessentially explaining myself to myself. Gerald Stern

My poems, I think, exist in a state of tension between the love of natural beauty and the fear of natural meaninglessness or absurdity. Hayden Carruth

Good writing gives energy, whatever it is about. But the fact that writers are dealing with essential issues...I think that's a necessary integration of literary writing with what's actually going on in our world. - Marilyn Hacker

I don't want to write poems that aren't necessary. - Maxine Kumin

I am a poet who is a woman, not a woman poet. - Ruth Fainlight

Hirshfield's poems renew, reaffirm the power of language to move deeply, to articulate experience precisely. - The Antioch Review