I like the way words go together and I like the gamesmanship of writing poetry. It is such a challenge.
To feel most beautifully alive means to be reading something beautiful, ready always to apprehend in the flow of language the sudden flash of poetry.
If my poetry aims to achieve anything, it's to deliver people from the limited ways in which they see and feel.
Poetry is a mixture of common sense, which not all have, with an uncommon sense, which very few have.
And at least in poetry you should feel free to lie. That is, not to lie, but to imagine what you want, to follow the direction of the poem.
The poetry of a people comes from the deep recesses of the unconscious, the irrational and the collective body of our ancestral memories.
Dismissals of poetry are nothing new. It's easy to dismiss poetry if one has not read much of it.
I've been most happy to be an advocate for the kinds of grassroots things that people are doing who care about poetry.
One will never again look at a birch tree, after the Robert Frost poem, in exactly the same way.
There is an urgent need for Americans to look deeply into themselves and their actions, and musical poetry is perhaps the most effective mirror available. Every newspaper headline is a potential song.
Anticipating that most poetry will be worse than carrying heavy luggage through O'Hare Airport, the public, to its loss, reads very little of it.
The older I've got the less I find myself going back and re-reading or really reading new fiction or poetry.
The urge to write poetry is like having an itch. When the itch becomes annoying enough, you scratch it.
In the United States, in poetry workshops, it's now quite a thing to make graduate students learn poems by heart.
The drama is complete poetry. The ode and the epic contain it only in germ; it contains both of them in a state of high development, and epitomizes both.
Now, to read poetry at all is to have an ideal anthology of one's own, and in that possession to be incapable of content with the anthologies of all the world besides.
Poetry is like making a joke. If you get one word wrong at the end of a joke, you've lost the whole thing.
Women often have a fraught relationship with their mothers, even though that's the most important relationship in their lives.
I was kind of a selfish child, who always wanted things his way, and I've kind of taken that over into my relationship with the world.
Instruments sound interesting, not because of their sound, but because of the relationship a player has with them. Instrumentalists build a rapport with their instruments, which is what you like and respond to.
Some of the greatest relationship films of all time, the two stars have hated each other, but mostly you see that chemistry.
