I once saw a picture in the paper of John Hegley with 'poet' written on his knuckles, and I thought that was pretty cool, so I was quite up front about it.
Writers, particularly poets, always feel exiled in some way - people who don't exactly feel at home, so they try to find a home in language.
I think that as a poet, I am always concerned about history and baring witness to history. But so often, it's through the research that I do, the reading.
We all know here that the law is the most powerful of schools for the imagination. No poet ever interpreted nature as freely as a lawyer interprets the truth.
It was difficult being a teacher and out of the closet in the '50s. By the time I retired, the English department was proud of having a gay poet of a certain minor fame. It was a very satisfactory change!
Dream study impacts culture. We are put in touch with the inner poet who dreams. We hear our inner, subjective response to the outer world. That helps spiritualize our lives.
I want to be a lawyer, a dancer, an actress, a mother, a wife, a children's author, a distance runner, a poet, a pianist, a pet store owner, an astronaut, an environmental and humanitarian activist, a psychiatrist, a ballet teacher, and the first wom...
I do not think men have more talent. There are a great many women in the arts; novelists, painters, sculptors, poets-but the proportion is far lower in the field of song writing.
Kevin Smith is so great in 'Kingdom Come,' isn't he? He's kind of this very earthy poet. He just has this immediate gregariousness, like, you kind of just want to be his pal.
There's not a good poet I know who has not at the beck and call of his memory a vast quantity of poetry that composes his mental library.
Example moves the world more than doctrine. The great exemplars are the poets of action, and it makes little difference whether they be forces for good or forces for evil.
The musician - if he be a good one - finds his own perception prompted by the poet's perception, and he translates the expression of that perception from the terms of poetry into the terms of music.
I think one ages and one dates. I tend to have a good deal of difficulty in liking some of the new poets.
To avoid being mistaken for a sellout, I chose my friends carefully. The more politically active black students. The foreign students. The Chicanos. The Marxist professors and structural feminists and punk-rock performance poets.
The good poet sticks to his real loves, those within the realm of possibility. He never tries to hold hands with God or the human race.
Artists - musicians, painters, writers, poets - always seem to have had the most accurate perception of what is really going on around them, not the official version or the popular perception of contemporary life.
I began my writing life as a poet, so poetry has always been fundamental. I evolved from poetry to journalism to stories to novels. But poetry was always there.
One travels so as to learn once more how to marvel at life in the way a child does. And blessed be the poet, the artist who knows how to keep alive his sense of wonder.
He who draws noble delights from sentiments of poetry is a true poet, though he has never written a line in all his life.
I never met anybody in my life who says, I want to be a critic. People want to be a fireman, poet, novelist.
If your daily life seems poor, do not blame it; blame yourself that you are not poet enough to call forth its riches; for the Creator, there is no poverty.
