C. K. Williams is a wonderful poet, in the authentic American tradition of Walt Whitman and William Carlos Williams, who tells us on every page what it means to be alive in our time. - Stanley Kunitz

I write poems to wake myself up, or to preserve a suddenly lit, awakened state...It's not nice dreams I'm yearning for; it's true dreams. - Heather McHugh

Robert Pinsky has what I think Shakespeare must have had: dexterity combined with worldliness, the magician's dazzling quickness fused with subtle intelligence... - Louise Gluck

What poetry does is put more oxygen into the atmosphere. Poetry makes it easier to breathe. - Kay Ryan

I'm always working with things that I don't understand - with the unconscious, the invisible. And trying to find a way to translate it. - Jean Valentine

If we see light at the end of the tunnel / It's the light of the oncoming train. - Robert Lowell

Happiness is having a scratch for every itch. - Ogden Nash

Properly, we should read for power. Man reading should be man intensely alive. The book should be a ball of light in one's hand. - Ezra Pound

In a dark time the eye begins to see - 'In a Dark Time', Theodore Roethke

Put your ear down close to your soul and listen hard. - Anne Sexton

Forget all rules, forget all restrictions, as to taste, as to what ought to be said, write for the pleasure of it... - William Carlos Williams

The blood jet is poetry,/ There is no stopping it. - 'Kindness', Sylvia Plath (written 1st February 1963)