I hardly remember how I started to write poetry. It's hard to imagine what I thought poetry could do.
If you cannot be a poet, be the poem.
When you write, it's just a much more crystalline, compressed version of the voice you think with - though not the one you speak with. I think your writing voice is your laser-guided missile. It's the poetry part of you.
Well, I still write poetry, but I wouldn't call myself a poet.
Poetry must have something in it that is barbaric, vast and wild.
A poem can have an impact, but you can't expect an audience to understand all the nuances.
I don't think that I ever believed that poetry would be a career. I have always thought of poems as something more private than professional... I would never introduce myself as a poet. I will always have some other thing that I am.
I think that I have less conviction than ever that poetry matters - that poetry changes or saves anything or anyone. But, in fact, that's tremendously freeing. If it doesn't matter much, the stakes are lower and you can't really fail. It's insurrecti...
There's poetry in being the band that can sell out Wembley but also makes a record in a garage. I don't like doing what people expect me to do.
The poetry from the eighteenth century was prose; the prose from the seventeenth century was poetry.
Well you can't teach the poetry, but you can teach the craft.
Some Marines made fun of the fact that I had done plays and studied poetry, but then I won the award for physical training.
Living here on Earth, we breathe the rhythms of a universe that extends infinitely above us. When resonant harmonies arise between this vast outer cosmos and the inner human cosmos, poetry is born.
All the modern verse plays, they're terrible; they're mostly about the poetry. It's more important that the play is first.
Poetry criticism at its worst today is mean in spirit and spiteful in intent, as if determined to inflict the wound that will spur the artist to new heights if it does not cripple him or her.
My favourite room in my house is easily the top room, which is a bedroom but also a bathroom, with a big, wooden carved bath, two huge fireplaces and a raised bit in the corner for performances. I've had some really lovely parties and poetry readings...
Publishing a volume of verse is like dropping a rose petal down the Grand Canyon and waiting for the echo.
Writing a book of poetry is like dropping a rose petal down the Grand Canyon and waiting for the echo.
Poetry is what Milton saw when he went blind.
I was a serious poet for quite a while and had little notebooks filled with poetry.
I was actually a poetry major in college before I punted and decided to become a theater major. I wrote the poem that we put on the sauerkraut boxes in the style of Elling.
