#poem

When I went to film school about three years ago, the first two years you're required to make a series of short films. I started making films based on short poems. ↗

— James Franco

#ago #based #film #film school #films

I have never started a poem yet whose end I knew. Writing a poem is discovering. ↗

— Robert Frost

#end #i #knew #never #poem

The figure a poem makes. It begins in delight and ends in wisdom... in a clarification of life - not necessarily a great clarification, such as sects and cults are founded on, but in a momentary stay against confusion. ↗

— Robert Frost

#begins #clarification #confusion #cults #delight

With me it's the whole thing, it's the conceit, the idea, what the poem is saying. And it goes on just as long as is necessary to say what needs to be said. ↗

— James Laughlin

#goes #idea #just #long #me

I am a genius who has written poems that will survive with the best of Shakespeare, Wordsworth and Keats. ↗

— Irving Layton

#best #genius #i #i am #keats

Back then, I couldn't have left a poem a year and gone back to it. ↗

— Philip Levine

#gone #i #left #poem #then

But most commonly, it's one poem that I work on with a lot of intensity. ↗

— Philip Levine

#i #intensity #lot #most #poem

If that voice that you created that is most alive in the poem isn't carried throughout the whole poem, then I destroy where it's not there, and I reconstruct it so that that voice is the dominant voice in the poem. ↗

— Philip Levine

#carried #created #destroy #dominant #i

My sense of a poem - my notion of how you revise - is: you get yourself into a state where what you are intensely conscious of is not why you wrote it or how you wrote it, but what you wrote. ↗

— Philip Levine

#get #how #intensely #into #notion

No good poem, however confessional it may be, is just a self-expression. Who on earth would claim that the pearl expresses the oyster? ↗

— C. Day Lewis

#earth #expresses #good #however #just