I heard Nirvana and discovered that songs could be like poetry but a little bit more refined: you didn't have to have 20 verses to get your point across.

I think that great poetry is the most interesting and complex use of the poet's language at that point in history and so it's even more exciting when you read a poet like Yeats almost 100 years old now and you think that perhaps no one can really top that.

I don't like political poetry and I don't write it. If this question was pointing towards that I think it is missing the point of the American tradition which is always apolitical even when the poetry comes out of politically active writers.

I cannot speak for more than an hour exclusively about poetry. At that point life itself takes over again.

I was a 16-year-old girl at one point so of course I wrote poetry.

The poem is the point at which our strength gave out.

A poem is true if it hangs together. Information points to something else. A poem points to nothing but itself.

A poet's work is to name the unnameable to point at frauds to take sides start arguments shape the world and stop it going to sleep.

Pet lovers know that animals sometimes understand us better than we do and the annals of human sin and desire provide plenty of stories to drive the point home.

There is so much of good in human nature that men grow to like each other upon better acquaintance and this points to another way in which we may strive to promote the peace of the world.