When I was a boy I was told that anybody could become President I'm beginning to believe it.

The urge to write poetry is like having an itch. When the itch becomes annoying enough you scratch it.

Since the printing press came into being poetry has ceased to be the delight of the whole community of man it has become the amusement and delight of the few.

I think that is where poetry reading becomes such an individual thing. I mean I have friend who like poets who just don't say anything to me at all I mean they seem to me rather ordinary and pedestrian.

I guess I wanted to leave America for awhile. It wasn't that I wanted to become an expatriate or just never come back I needed some breathing room. I'd already been translating French poetry I'd been to Paris once before and liked it very much and so I just went.

I was influenced by surrealist poetry and painting as were thousands of other people and it seems to me to have become a part of the way I write but it's not.

Most people can't tell now who wrote what. I like that blurring of identities within the band. because it becomes a unified thing that can't be related to other forms of historical poetry.

He passes from lyric to epic poetry in order to speak about the world and the torment in the world through man rationally and emotionally. The poet then becomes a danger.

So poetry becomes a means for useful dialogue between people who are not only unknown but mute to each other. It produces a dialogue among people that guards all of us against manipulation by our so-called leaders.

I was always making up rhymes. But I never thought that poetry would become my life.