But I can only write what the muse allows me to write. I cannot choose I can only do what I am given and I feel pleased when I feel close to concrete poetry - still.

One can't write for all readers. A poet cannot write for people who don't like poetry.

People wish to be poets more than they wish to write poetry and that's a mistake. One should wish to celebrate more than one wishes to be celebrated.

There are men who can write poetry and there are men who can read balance sheets. The men who can read balance sheets cannot write.

My mother carried on and supported us her ambition had been to write poetry and songs.

I want to write a book of poetry as well as children's stories.

I do not see how a man can work on the frontiers of physics and write poetry at the same time. They are in opposition.

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.

I wonder if I ever thought of an ideal reader... I guess when I was in my 20s and in New York and maybe even in my early 30s I would write for my wife Janice... mainly for my poet friends and my wife who was very smart about poetry.

I used to write sonnets and various things and moved from there into writing prose which incidentally is a lot more interesting than poetry including the rhythms of prose.

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.

Children can write poetry and then unless they're poets they stop when reach puberty.

Even if you only want to write science fiction you should also read mysteries poetry mainstream literature history biography philosophy and science.

I'm quite sure that most writers would sustain real poetry if they could but it takes devotion and talent.

So I really began as a failed poet - although when I first wanted to be a writer I learned to write prose by reading poetry.