"Don't ask me what I mean" by Clare Brown and Don Paterson (eds) (Picador, 2003)

Subtitled "Poets in their own words", it's the edited highlights of prose that poets wrote for the Poetry Book Society when it selected a book of theirs. As the editors point out, postmoderns and performance poets' books weren't chosen.

• Charles Causley wrote that "The effect of a poem (but not necessarily its 'meaning', whatever that implies) should be instantaneous. At the same time, the poem should conceal certain properties that may only reveal themselves very gradually". I think poets and readers differ widely about the relative importance of these two properties of poems.
• "Performing an act of literary criticism on your own work is a little like do-it-yourself dentistry: a sloppy affair at best, not to mention the pain involved for writer and reader alike" (Billy Collins)
• Michael Donaghy is entertaining.
• "How might we be educated by anticipatory grief? And how, finally, do we love a world that's always disappearing? ... Grief, it seems to me, is an education in both beauty and sorrow" (Mark Doty), p.60
• "In retrospect I feel that during the year I worked hardest on Elegies it was only within each poem as I wrote it that my life had any meaning" (Douglas Dunn), p.70
• "the Muse deserted [Wordsworth] and in his late work the marvellous original poems become boring ones ... Also Wordsworth had no sense of humour. Humour is valuable. It makes a poet realise that he's not as important as he thinks he is" (Gavin Ewart), p.78
• W. S. Graham‘s effort isn’t very reader-friendly.
• Grigson writes “I regret a certain snobbery in these sentences.” Indeed.
• Thom Gunn deals with the assignment seriously
• "there has been considerable expectation that poets from Northern Ireland should 'say' something about 'the situation' but in the end they will only be worth listening to if they are saying something about and to themselves" (Seamus Heaney), p.102
• "the concept of poetry ... as self expression has always repelled me", (p.105); "Conventional metres and conventional rhyme schemes ... can nowadays only be used for light and occasional verse" (p.106) (John Heath-Stubbs)
• ”I accept, though with some reluctance, that my poetry is generally regarded as difficult” … I am baffled and saddened when readers, friendly as much as unfriendly, approach my poems as cryptograms to be decoded” (Geoffrey Hill), p.116
• ”I think that legitimate difficulty (difficulty of course can be faked) is essentially democratic” (Geoffrey Hill), p.116)
• "a poet goes so deeply inside himself to write a poem that he ceases to be himself at all" (P.J. Kavanagh), p.137
• "ability to face outwards, using personal predicament as a spur and not an end in itself, is almost totally lacking. The indifference of the educated public to poetry is justified ... the future of English poetry is bound tight to the future of the working class. Laments over the decay of religion, the loss of this or that sex partner, the glories of Italian summer holidays &c., are meaningless and destructive",(Christopher Logue), p.149
• "in a sense most poems are love poems; that because a poet is someone for whom no experience is complete until he has written about it, most poems are elegies as well" (Michael Longley (p.152)
• "To me, the thriller at its best is close in spirit to poetry, which, however it expresses itself ... must always be a contemplation or unravelling of mystery" (Blake Morrison), p.187
• "England has a tradition that emphasises the role of tone in poetry and rightly so" (Craig Raine), p.222
• "The sestina strikes me as the poetic equivalent of an instrument for removing Beluga caviar from horses' hooves - bizarrely impressive, but finally useless" (Craig Raine), p.223
• "The penalty of being a lyric poet is the law of diminishing returns, the temptation to repeat oneself unconsciously or even consciously", (R.S. Thomas) p.285
• "Is God dead? The very mention of his name and of prayer in a poem now arouses the derision of jobbing reviewers. Generally speaking, comtemporary English poetry is cheap and shallow as a result", (R.S. Thomas) p.286
• "I believe with past writers on the subject that metaphor is the supreme sign of poetic ability. Without this gift a lyric seems to me to be generally speaking dull. That is why I find so much of contemporary poetry dull", (R.S. Thomas) p.286
• "I can foresee a time when poetry as we have known it will, like the Marxist state, wither away, and only poets be left", (Peter Whigam) p.301
• "In keeping with fashion rather than strict honesty, I put the poems to do with unhappiness and searching at the end of the book, but the wheel has gone round often since then and most people read slim volumes backwards", (Hugo Williams) p.309
• "one cannot help remembering how few poets have improved much after forty if indeed they didn't get a lot worse", (Hugo Williams) p.312
• "Listening to English writers talking about surrealism is about as fruitful as listening to Frenchmen discussing a cricket match", (John Hartley Williams) p.317
• "Pity for the poets who have no subject save themselves", (Christopher Logue) p.328