Music is more emotional than prose, more revolutionary than poetry. I'm not saying I've got the answers, just a of questions that I don't hear other artists asking.

Religion is no more possible without prayer than poetry without language, or music without atmosphere.

The quietest poetry can be an explosion of joy.

The young people have MTV and rock and roll. Why would they go to read poetry? Poetry belongs to the Stone Age. It awakens in us perceptions that go back to those times.

Alchemy is the art of far and near, and I think poetry is alchemy in that way. It's delightful to distort size, to see something that's tiny as though it were vast.

I don't think the creative writing industry has helped American poetry.

You have to really dive deep back into yourself and get rid of so much modern analytical categorization. It's one of the great things poetry does.

I think that it's more likely that in my 60s and 70s I will be writing poetry rather than fiction.

Even the people who have had success and made money writing these books of fiction seem to feel the need to pretend it's no big deal, or part of a natural progression from poetry to fiction, but often it's really just about the money, the perceived prestige.

In the past, poetry came in the form of spells and chants used to effect change.

I think when kids just see well-crafted poetry, it's just obtuse to them. It's hard to relate to.

Poets should ignore most criticism and get on with making poetry.

Who writes poetry imbibes honey from the poisoned lips of life.

There is a wonderful Hungarian literature, especially in lyric poetry.

I'm hopefully touring with Colin Baker next year in Perfect Strangers. I have performed with Sylvia Simms in poetry and music evenings. I would love to do those for the rest of my career - they are so fun and witty.

That's one of the great things about poetry; one realises that one does one's little turn - that you're just part of the great crop, as it were.

For whatever reason, people, including very well-educated people or people otherwise interested in reading, do not read poetry.

That is what I did with Jack, and that's why he liked to do the readings with me because he knew I was there for him, and for our ability to blend the poetry and the music.

I've already written 300 space poems. But I look upon my ultimate form as being a poetic prose. When you read it, it appears to be prose, but within the prose you have embedded the techniques of poetry.

We don't attempt to have any theme for a number of the anthology, or to have any particular sequence. We just put in things that we like, and then we try to alternate the prose and the poetry.

I think that concrete poetry seems to have, as far as I can see, come to a kind of a dead end. It doesn't seem to be going any further than it went in its high period of about five or six years ago.

And how can poetry stand up against its new conditions? Its position is perfectly precarious.

On the other hand, if there's an underlying core of poetry that I go to, I go to the sea. I've lived on the sea all my life. I live on the sea in Cape Breton.

I realized poetry's the thing that I can do 'cause I can stick at it and work with tremendous intensity.