Today the U.S. is farther from being nourished by poetry than it was a hundred years ago, when books of poems were best-sellers.

The idea of avant-garde art is a very suspicious thing to me, the idea that poetry is new and it keeps being new the way Chevrolets every year are new.

The decision to write in prose instead of poetry is made more by the readers than by writers. Almost no one is interested in reading narrative in verse.

Among the American contemporaries I read with most enjoyment are several North Carolinians. I think the best poetry being written these days is being written by Southerners.

Pound's translation of Chinese poetry was maybe the most important thing I read. Eliot a little bit later.

I've often entertained paranoid suspicions about my fridge and what it's been doing to my poetry when I'm not looking, but I never even considered that my fan was thinking about me.

It's just poetry, beauty and love. How hard can that be to act?

I don't think it's always good to read lots of poetry.

I think it comes from really liking literary forms. Poetry is very beautiful, but the space on the page can be as affecting as where the text is. Like when Miles Davis doesn't play, it has a poignancy to it.

I knew what book we had to write, it was clear in my head; it was journals and poetry. So I passed on their offer. I told my agent this is our vision, and no one's done it this way.

Poetry for me is as much a spiritual practice as sexual ecstasy is.

Deep feeling doesn't make for good poetry. A way with language would be a bit of help.

That sense of a life in natural objects, which in most poetry is but a rhetorical artifice, was, then, in Wordsworth the assertion of what was for him almost literal fact.

I learned to impersonate the kind of person that talks about poetry. It comes from teaching, I think.

The fact that something is in a rhymed form or in blank verse will not make it good poetry.

Some people swear by writing courses, but whether it really helps American poetry, I have doubts.

Poetry, almost by definition, calls attention to its language and form.

The great watershed of modern poetry is French, more than English.

I did not have a very literary background. I came to poetry from the sciences and mathematics, and also through an interest in Japanese and Chinese poetry in translation.

Humour is a fine line to walk in poetry, as in fiction. I just think it's harder to write. It's harder to keep the respect of the reader too.

My obsession with time informs my poetry so completely it is hard for me to summarize it. We want time to pass, for new things to happen to us, we want to hold on to certain moments, we don't want our lives to end.

I've got a book of poetry by the bed, one of these big collections that goes back to the Greeks and Romans.

I'd always loved poetry and I'd always loved writing music and composing music, but I hadn't thought of putting the two together until around that time.

I don't think you get to good writing unless you expose yourself and your feelings. Deep songs don't come from the surface; they come from the deep down. The poetry and the songs that you are suppose to write, I believe are in your heart.