The end of the world is on people's minds. We have the power to destroy or save ourselves, but the question is what do you do with that responsibility.
What point is there to all the wealth and power that America may have if they can't look after its own?
I did literature at university, so I had a real relationship with poetry, but they don't make many films about the world of a poet.
How does one happen to write a poem: where does it come from? That is the question asked by the psychologists or the geneticists of poetry.
Auden said poetry makes nothing happen. But I wonder if the opposite could be true. It could make something happen.
I think poetry can help children deal with the other subjects on the curriculum by enabling them to see a subject in a new way.
I think book clubs should read more contemporary poetry.
All the modern verse plays, they're terrible; they're mostly about the poetry. It's more important that the play is first.
Writing a book of poetry is like dropping a rose petal down the Grand Canyon and waiting for the echo.
My father had wanted to name me for Dylan Thomas. He had seen him speak on one of those drunken poetry tours he did.
None but a poet can write a tragedy. For tragedy is nothing less than pain transmuted into exaltation by the alchemy of poetry.
I think what will happen is that fiction will become more like poetry. As in, the only people who read it will write it.
There is no gilding of setting sun or glamor of poetry to light up the ferocious and endless toil of the farmers' wives.
My next project is to get back to that. Actually, to learn how to write poetry. I'm not kidding.
It may be said that poems are in one way like icebergs: only about a third of their bulk appears above the surface of the page.
I was trained as an actress. But I wasn't a very convincing actress, so I started doing punk poetry and then fell into doing stand-up.
And how can poetry stand up against its new conditions? Its position is perfectly precarious.
They need to learn poetry. They don't need to learn about poetry. They don't need to be told how to interpret poetry. They don't need to be told how to understand poetry. They need to learn it.
The more poetry you have in the head, the more poetry you will understand because you will be getting to the roots of what it is that makes people write poetry at all.
For whatever reason, people, including very well-educated people or people otherwise interested in reading, do not read poetry.
Probably all the attention to poetry results in some value, though the attention is more often directed to lesser than to greater values.
