Well the great thing for me about poetry is that in good poems the dislocation of words that is to say the distance between what they say they're saying and what they are actually saying is at its greatest.

I think I'm a very good reader of poetry but obviously like everybody I have a set of criteria for reading poems and I'm not shy about presenting them so if people ask for my critical response to a poem I tell them what works and why and what doesn't work and why.

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.

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.

Thanks partly to the kind of poets that we now have and partly to funding there's been a gigantic shift in the way poetry is perceived... Poems on the Underground poets in schools football clubs zoos.

On July 26 1916 I announced to all my friends in America that from now on I resolved to write no more poems in the classical language and to begin my experiments in writing poetry in the so-called vulgar tongue of the people.

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

How do poems grow? They grow out of your life.

You don't help people in your poems. I've been trying to help people all my life - that's my trouble.

There'll always be working people in my poems because I grew up with them and I am a poet of memory.