I began the way nearly everybody I ever heard of - I began writing poetry. And I find that to be quite usual with writers their trying their hand at poetry.

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 next project is to get back to that. Actually to learn how to write poetry. I'm not kidding.

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'm perfectly happy when I look out at an audience and it's all women. I always think it's kind of odd but then more women than men I think read and write poetry.

How does one happen to write a poem: where does it come from? That is the question asked by the psychologists or the geneticists of poetry.

None but a poet can write a tragedy. For tragedy is nothing less than pain transmuted into exaltation by the alchemy of poetry.

The more poetry you have in the head the more poetry you will understand because you will be getting to the roots of what it is that makes people write poetry at all.

My friends never talk to me about my poetry because they're embarrassed that I write it or they're embarrassed by what I write about which are not such extraordinarily terrifying things but they are the state of human existence.

I had art as a major along with English French and History. I had dance modern dance. In English I was allowed to write my own poetry which I eventually got published.