You know bad poetry I wrote in high school can still be found on the Internet and you know there's a Web log of our college newspaper. You know there's so many different stages of my creative development are sort of on-record if somebody were to choose to look for them.

Poetry is what we turn to in the most emotional moments of our life - when a beloved friend dies when a baby is born or when we fall in love.

I've written for every medium except poetry at which I suck.

I find a lot of poetry to be narcissistic.

I gave up on new poetry myself 30 years ago when most of it began to read like coded messages passing between lonely aliens in a hostile world.

The musician is perhaps the most modest of animals but he is also the proudest. It is he who invented the sublime art of ruining poetry.

Poetry is what Milton saw when he went blind.

Romance like a ghost escapes touching it is always where you are not not where you are. The interview or conversation was prose at the time but it is poetry in the memory.

Art: If the object of poetry is to make men then poetry is the heir of prophecy.

I did not have a very literary background. I came to poetry from the sciences and mathematics and also through an interest in Japanese and Chinese poetry in translation.