We explore our environment, more than we are compelled to utter poetry, when we're toddlers. We start doing that later. Before that happens, every child is a scientist.
Poetry heals the wounds inflicted by reason.
Poetry has, in a way, been my bridge to my acting career.
To read a poem is to hear it with our eyes; to hear it is to see it with our ears.
The commonest error made in relation to poetry is that it consists simply in verse-making. Many confound the casket of meter and rhyme with the jewel of thought which it encloses, and, perhaps, in some instances, after close investigation, they have ...
A poet can survive everything but a misprint.
All bad poetry springs from genuine feeling.
I guess I wanted to leave America for awhile. It wasn't that I wanted to become an expatriate, or just never come back, I needed some breathing room. I'd already been translating French poetry, I'd been to Paris once before and liked it very much, an...
Poetry is a sort of homecoming.
My friends never talk to me about my poetry because they're embarrassed that I write it or they're embarrassed by what I write about which are not such extraordinarily terrifying things, but they are the state of human existence.
I think poetry has lost an awful lot of its muscle because nobody knows any. Nobody has to memorize poetry.
Dealing with poetry is a daunting task, simply because the reason one does it as an editor at all is because one is constantly coming to terms with one's own understanding of how to understand the world.
Poetry is composing for the breath.
Poetry was invented as an mnemonic device to enable people to remember their prayers.
Poetry should be able to reach everybody, and it should be able to appeal to all levels of understanding.
I like poems that are little games.
And there are a lot more people reading poetry, but there are not so many people reading an individual poet.
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.
There are so many things that poetry is about, one of which is memory.
It is a way we reassess our past. We can do that in poetry in ways we can't do in prose.
