#poem

If you read quickly to get through a poem to what it means, you have missed the body of the poem. ↗

— M. H. Abrams

#body #get #means #missed #poem

I can't tell you where a poem comes from, what it is, or what it is for: nor can any other man. The reason I can't tell you is that the purpose of a poem is to go past telling, to be recognised by burning. ↗

— A. R. Ammons

#burning #comes #go #i #man

Besides the actual reading in class of many poems, I would suggest you do two things: first, while teaching everything you can and keeping free of it, teach that poetry is a mode of discourse that differs from logical exposition. ↗

— A. R. Ammons

#besides #class #differs #discourse #everything

I like poems you can tack all over with a hammer and there are no hollow places. ↗

— John Ashbery

#hollow #i #like #over #places

An experienced reader uses the poem as an agent of inquiry. This makes poetry very exciting, unstable, and interactive. ↗

— John Barton

#exciting #experienced #inquiry #interactive #makes

Most victims of my autobiographical verse are either far too polite, remarkably understanding unaware that I have written poems about them. ↗

— John Barton

#autobiographical #either #far #i #most

The experiment of the poem is mostly intuitive. I write the first draft, pulling in the various elements that interest me, in the hope that their being combined will lead to some kind of insight. ↗

— John Barton

#combined #draft #elements #experiment #first

The point of an experiment is not to arrive at a predetermined end point, to prove or disprove anything, but to deliver a poem that reveals much about the process taken. ↗

— John Barton

#anything #arrive #deliver #disprove #end

The reader's challenge is to replicate the experiment by reading the poem and to draw their own conclusions. ↗

— John Barton

#conclusions #draw #experiment #own #poem

Writing can sometimes be exploitative. I like to take a few steps of remove in order to respect the privacy of the subject. If readers make the link, they have engaged with the poem. ↗

— John Barton

#exploitative #few #i #like #link