Listeners are kind of ambushed... if a poem just happens to be said when they're listening to the radio. The listener doesn't have time to deploy what I call their 'poetry deflector shields' that were installed in high school - there's little time to resist the poem.

The completely solitary self: that's where poetry comes from, and it gets isolated by crisis, and those crises are often very intimate also.

As for how criticism of Keats' poetry relates to criticism of my own work, I'll leave that for others to decide.

I don't think anybody reads a book of poetry front to back. Editors and reviewers only. I don't think anybody else does.

In England, we'd leave school at 15 and go on to a college, and I went to further education in a town called Welling Garden City. I fully immersed myself in bohemia there, which included poetry and modern art, jazz, philosophy, social radicalism.

Society's dark hull drifts further and further away. It is this place - the place of our separation, our distinction - that much of his poetry occupies.

Poetry is partly sympathy, don't you think? If it's any good, it gets people to think about others' points of view.

With a poetry book I can send 100 copies out to reviewers and other people, and even do it in advance and get their response. It's difficult with iPad: how do you send it out for free, and how do you even disseminate it before it goes into their store?

People think of poetry as a school subject... Poetry is very frustrating to students because they don't have a taste for ambiguity, for one thing. That gives them a poetry hangover.

We read Robert Browning's poetry. Here we needed no guidance from the professor: the poems themselves were enough.

In all my work, in the movies I write, the lyrics, the poetry, the prose, the essays, I am saying that we may encounter many defeats - maybe it's imperative that we encounter the defeats - but we are much stronger than we appear to be and maybe much better than we allow ourselves to be. Human beings are more alike than unalike.

I don't think I've ever read poetry, ever. I'm not really book-smart.

By definition, poetry works with qualities and dynamics that mainstream society is reluctant to face head-on. It's an interesting phenomenon that by necessity, poetry is just below the radar.

Drawing is a way of coming upon the connection between things, just like metaphor in poetry reconnects what has become separated.

Prose is not so dependent on sound. The line of poetry, with the breaking of the line - to me, sound is the kind of doorway into poetry. And my sense of sound, or my ability to control it, lapsed or grew less.

Colloquial poetry is to the real art as the barber's wax dummy is to sculpture.

Rap is poetry to music, like beatniks without beards and bongos.

Surrealism is not a poetry but a poetics, and even more, and more decisively, a world vision.

When Auden said his poetry didn't save one Jew from the gas chamber, he'd said it all.

A documentary film-maker can't help but use poetry to tell the story. I bring truth to my fiction. These things go hand in hand.

The oration of poetry, I consider to be its own art form and tradition.

I found poetry at 12 and 13 and, lo and behold, learned that my attorney father had a background in poetry - as he wore dashikis and Afros in the '70s and named his kids Arabic names. He was a poet and a lot like The Last Poets and Gil Scott-Heron and all of these folks. He definitely was an artist.

Some people ask, 'How do you attract the young and so many different people when your poetry is complicated and different?' I say, 'My accomplishment is that my readers trust me and accept my suggestions for change.'

Of course a poem is a two-way street. No poem is any good if it doesn't suggest to the reader things from his own mind and recollection that he will read into it, and will add to what the poet has suggested. But I do think poetry readings are very important.