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.

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.

Distinctly American poetry is usually written in the context of one's geographic landscape sometimes out of one's cultural myths and often with reference to gender and race or ethnic origins.

Because in fact women feminists do read my poetry and they read it often with the power of their political interpretation. I don't care that's what poetry is supposed to do.

Every so often I find some poems that are too good for the readers of The Atlantic because they are a little too involved with the nature of poetry as such.

Poetry it is often said and loudly so is life's true mirror. But a monkey looking into a work of literature looks in vain for Socrates.

When I really want to be soothed and reminded of why people bother to fiddle with sentences I often read poetry.

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

I often imagine that the longer he studies English literature the more the Japanese student must be astonished at the extraordinary predominance given to the passion of love both in fiction and in poetry.

When you're going through something whether it's a wonderful thing like having a child or a sad thing like losing somebody you often feel like 'Oh my God I'm so overwhelmed I'm dealing with this huge thing on my own.' In fact poetry's a nice reminder that no everybody goes through it. These are universal experiences.