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.
The poet sees better than other mortals. I do not see things as they are, but according to my own subjective impression, and this makes life easier and simpler.
The poet is a faker / Who's so good at his act / He even fakes the pain / Of pain he feels in fact.
Yet do I marvel at this curious thing: To make a poet black, and bid him sing.
Poets deal in writing about feelings and trying to find the language and images for intense feelings.
When Robert Frost was alive, I was known as the other new England poet, which is to be barely known at all.
Most poets are elitist dregs more concerned with proving their skill with a dictionary than communicating ideas with impact.
I am what libraries and librarians have made me, with little assistance from a professor of Greek and poets.
Talent is a faucet. When it is on, one must write. Inspiration is a farce that poets have invented to give themselves importance.
Most poets, like most people, try hard to be like someone they admire or they are possessed with an image of what they ought to be.
The community of poets I belong to is not as close as it used to be, if only for the fact that our lives have become busier: jobs, children, and the like.
Every individual ought to know at least one poet from cover to cover: if not as a guide through the world, then as a yardstick for the language.
If a poet is anybody, he is somebody to whom things made matter very little - somebody who is obsessed by Making.
