Marge Piercy: Read widely, read out loud. Nobody can tell you which poets will move you. You find the kind of poetry that moves you the most and you try to write it. You have to study the craft. Nobody can teach you the stuff that it is you that will become poetry, but you can learn a lot about how to use imagery, the oral resources at your disposal, line breaks, line lengths, how to shape the poem. You can study openings and endings.
Honor Moore: Aspiring poets should read other poets. They should study great poets one at a time, mastering that poet's work. They should go to poetry readings. Carry a notebook wherever they go. Write down lines that come into their heads. Write down shards of speech overheard. Get tapes and CDs of poets reading and listen to them, writing as they listen. Imitate other poems, self-consciously, take a poetry workshop with a poet they admire, share their poems with friends, fall in love and write poems from it, get angry and write poems from it, get sad and write poems from it, look at something beautiful and write poems from it.
Richard Matthews: Write. Treat writing poetry like any other really great job that you don't want to get fired from; e.g., don't not show up for days on end without some compelling excuse like hospitalization. Read widely and deeply so that you have a thorough knowledge of the whole history of your literature and the work of your contemporaries, and write about your reading, even if it is just for journal entries, not essays (which are nice). Read other genres; don't just read poetry; read the newspaper everyday; read other languages. Don't sneer at exercises. Spend an extended period of time in a place where you will not hear English spoken. Study things like drawing and music: drawing class may not teach you to draw, but it can teach you to see. Ignore all advice and make an active study of what drives you to work and enables you to produce (from times of day to types of paper) and make that study your guide.
Billy Collins: Aspiring poets need to read in order to find the poet who will drive them to write better out of envy. The best teachers of poetry are not in the classroom; they are waiting on the shelves of the library to be opened and read.
Jeffrey Greene: Poetry is a passion for me, so I believe that any involvement with writing and reading poetry will enrich a person's life. Read, read, read --- this is essential. Don't become too enamored with successful poets or teachers, their eccentricities or mystique; become enamored with the beauty of their poems. Focus on your own eccentricities or mystique and work twice
as hard as you are now.
Marc Woodworth: The advice IS to read, much and widely. Students who write poems for a workshop that I lead have the chance to apprentice themselves to great poets, to learn to write by reading and by writing in the presence of great poems. As most artists find, apprenticeship is an essential stage in finding one's own place.
Cornelius Eady: If they really have caught the bug, no amount of advice, good or bad, will stop them. The only suggestion I have for reading is to try to take in as much poetry as they can. I've noticed that every poet I've ever considered "great"has turned out to be a great and generous reader as well.
Mary Jo Bang: I tell them what someone told me years ago when I was studying photography. It takes seven years to become almost anything. That is, to become an expert at something of substance. I tell them to read everything and to try to learn from excellence on those rare occasions when they encounter it.
