Honor Moore: I did not choose poetry, it chose me. First I loved reading it, as the text I followed in church, as what I translated in school out of Latin and Greek, as what I read in Shakespeare's plays, as what I read as an English Literature major, as what I listened to and was inspired by at poetry readings. I had to do that, I felt. Now I consider it a way to keep renewing our language, and as a way I think, and as a way I speak, and as the way I have to make music.
I think of a poem as more like a sculpture, prose as more like a painting, something on the wall, having one physical dimension. And so there is more I can say in a poem, by encoding those things in my line breaks, my word choices, my sound choices, my formal choices. I can even secretly disagree with myself, or seduce you, the reader, or make you laugh when you think you should be crying, or make you feel safe when you think you should be scared.
Marge Piercy: It isn't a question of saying. It's the difference between a primary emphases on story --- events moving through time and leading to each other --- and an emphasis on the lyric moment, on the creation of an artifact built of sounds and silences that may chant or sing or talk conversationally. I write equally both fiction and poetry, and an idea or a seed or germ for something comes with its genre built in. You don't get a couple of lines reverberating in your mind for a poem and think, maybe I should write a novel instead.
Billy Collins: Wiggenstein said that in philosophical investigation when we reach things that cannot be said, we must learn to stop talking. But that is the point where great poetry begins to talk. Poetry is a way of saying what cannot otherwise be said. Poems that fail are usually poems that are saying something that could just as easily be said in a letter or a note on the table.
Jeffrey Greene: Poetry doesn't exist without the most acute attention to sound. When that attention to sound is attuned to thought, emotion, and image, the poet achieves an unforgettable kind of ignition, the beauty of language fitting form, expression finding the perfect body.
Richard Matthews: It is difficult to answer this in the sense that I don't see what is being "said" in the poems as some sort of separable thing. To the extent that you can say about a poem "this is what I'm saying," I do not think the poem needs to be a poem, in which case, I suppose, prose would do just as well. I think there is a tendency to confuse recognizable with the divisible in considering the components of a work of art. A poem, any real work of art I think, is precisely that which cannot be comprehended or comprehensible expressed in any other way than the way it is being expressed. (Okay, we're getting tautological, but that may be the point.) For me, what I "say" is something that occurs in the making of the poem; it doesn't really exist a priori to the linguistic occasion, and divorced from that occasion, I suspect, it withers and dies a swift but painful and unattractive death. The appeal of poetry for me has much to do with my suspicion that those things which can only exists as poems are those which are closest to what is most essentially and profoundly aesthetic, which is to say that which is most essentially and profoundly human. The sorts of architectonics, the thematic manipulations, the linguistic indulgence, the sonorities, the contrapuntal play, the simultaneous elusiveness and allusiveness of thought, word, emotion and gesture, that appeal to me, that make for me the satisfying aesthetic experience that a poem should be, are deployed most readily and effectively and encountered most compellingly, for me anyway, in the confines of poetry.
Mary Jo Bang: Poetry is not about the "what is said;" it's about how the "what is said" is said. Anything said in poetry could be said in prose if you were to reduce what is said to its most reductive but the fact is that by saying it the way a poem says it, the subject is complicated. Meaning begins to layer and the ensuing layers, tied together now by nuance, can't be completely teased apart. That is exactly what is so appealing.
Marc Woodworth: Philip Larkin defines a poem as "an emotional machine made of words." I like that definition. It reminds me that there can be in poetry a causal relationship between words and feeling (however complex the emotion, however irreducible to paraphrase) that is more precise and responsive than in any other kind of writing.
Cornelius Eady: My personal theory is that a very good poem compels a reader to re-examine their world. All art ---painting, dancing, music, prose --- is about what is means to be awake, aware and human, but for me, poetry gets beneath the surface of things quicker and more intimately than other writing.
