To have great poets there must be great audiences.

Poets utter great and wise things which they do not themselves understand.

And poets in my view and I think the view of most people do speak God's language - it's better it's finer it's language on a higher plane than ordinary people speak in their daily lives.

To avoid being mistaken for a sellout I chose my friends carefully. The more politically active black students. The foreign students. The Chicanos. The Marxist professors and structural feminists and punk-rock performance poets.

In its famous paradox the equation of money and excrement psychoanalysis becomes the first science to state what common sense and the poets have long known - that the essence of money is in its absolute worthlessness.

There has been a time on earth when poets had been young and dead and famous - and were men. But now the poet as the tragic child of grandeur and destiny had changed. The child of genius was a woman now and the man was gone.

Poets are the only people to whom love is not only a crucial but an indispensable experience which entitles them to mistake it for a universal one.

But are not the dreams of poets and the tales of travellers notoriously false?

We have to raise the consciousness the only way poets can change the world is to raise the consciousness of the general populace.

Modern poets talk against business poor things but all of us write for money. Beginners are subjected to trial by market.