Politics: A strife of interests masquerading as a contest of principles. The conduct of public affairs for private advantage.

But poetry is a way of language it is not its subject or its maker's background or interests or hobbies or fixations. It is nearer to utterance than history.

And inasmuch as the bridge is a symbol of all such poetry as I am interested in writing it is my present fancy that a year from now I'll be more contented working in an office than ever before.

The poetry and transgression that was so much of surrealism's anarchic force has been recruited into mainstream culture. It has been made commonplace by television and magazine merchandising by computer games and Internet visuals by film and MTV by the fashion shoot.

I think we will always have the impulse towards visual poetry with us and I wouldn't agree with Bly that it's a bad thing. It depends on the ability of the individual poet to do it well and to make a shape which is interesting enough to hold your attention.

Because people are very interested in my poetry in what I say.

I was always interested in French poetry sort of as a sideline to my own work I was translating contemporary French poets. That kind of spilled out into translation as a way to earn money pay for food and put bread on the table.

For whatever reason people including very well-educated people or people otherwise interested in reading do not read poetry.

I was excited by what my painter friends were doing and they seemed to be interested in our poetry too and that was a wonderful little fizzy sort of world.

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 think that great poetry is the most interesting and complex use of the poet's language at that point in history and so it's even more exciting when you read a poet like Yeats almost 100 years old now and you think that perhaps no one can really top that.

Because in fact women feminists do read my poetry and they read it often with the power of their political interpretation. I don't care that's what poetry is supposed to do.

They need to learn poetry. They don't need to learn about poetry. They don't need to be told how to interpret poetry. They don't need to be told how to understand poetry. They need to learn it.

I've always written all my life and when I was very young I developed an interest in poetry.

An experienced reader uses the poem as an agent of inquiry. This makes poetry very exciting unstable and interactive.

I think that's what poetry does. It allows people to come together and identify with a common thing that is outside of themselves but which they identify with from the interior.

In fact a lot of them I think are absolute baloney. Those Charles Olsens and people like that. At first I was interested in seeing what they were up to what they were doing why they were doing it. They never moved me in the way that one is moved by true poetry.

I was very interested in American poetry for many years. Much less now.

The decision to write in prose instead of poetry is made more by the readers than by writers. Almost no one is interested in reading narrative in verse.

Translation is an interestingly different way to be involved both with poetry and with the language that I've found myself living in much of the time. I think the two feed each other.

I see a resurgence of interest in poetry. I am less optimistic about the prospects for the arts when it comes to federal funding.

The subject of Finnish poetry ought to have a special interest for the Japanese student if only for the reason that Finnish poetry comes more closely in many respects to Japanese poetry than any other form of Western poetry.

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.

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.