From an interview with Tom Yuill

I compose all the time, always have a pen and scrap of paper in my pocket or by the bed, so sudden inspiration must certainly be part of what I’m doing. But I work on the lines, the stanzas, the poems, all of it, over and over. I have spent years listening to a poem over and over, trying to make sure the rhythms I have on the page are right for the poem itself. I take great swaths of lines, pull three of seven out and fuse them with one or twelve more I wrote at another time. No rules, really, except that I want to the poem to be itself, to be a realized, complete work of art. And, sure, for me part of that is giving it the right lines, not the flashiest lines, not the strangest lines, not the most formally strict lines, none of that. If the lines are memorable I give credit to the poem, that is to say, I said it aloud so many times it must have wrung from itself whatever wasn’t ringing true. As Shakespeare, Lowell, Sidney, Villon, Fulke Greville and Frost teach us, what rings true artistically IS often memorable.

-- Boston-based poet Tom Yuill, responding to interviewer Louis Mayeux's comment and question: "Like Lowell, you have a gift for memorable, striking individual lines that click into the mind like gold coins. Do you work and rework these lines, or are they products of sudden inspiration?"

Beck Tuch on how lit mags matter

I’ll tell you, there is an essay from Granta that I read years ago and which I still think about every single day. There is a discussion forum in Boston Review from which I still quote in conversation. There is one poem that I read in Beecher’s many months ago, which flits through my mind constantly.

-- Becky Tuch, founding editor of The Review Review, responding in the Ploughshares blog to certain persistent myths about literary magazines