You pick up loads of baggage with your first record with reaction to it from fans and critics. So I went to Ireland by myself for a couple of weeks with my guitar. I read lots of poetry I read Patti Smith's autobiography and started words and phrases and then songs started to take shape.

Poetry for me is as much a spiritual practice as sexual ecstasy is.

My films are an extension of my poetry using the white screen like the white page to be filled with images.

Everything is complicated if that were not so life and poetry and everything else would be a bore.

Money is a kind of poetry.

Poetry is a political act because it involves telling the truth.

I think there are things in my story that have helped my creativity. Your father being killed for instance is one of the best things that could happen to a kid if he's going to write poetry or songs.

Anticipating that most poetry will be worse than carrying heavy luggage through O'Hare Airport the public to its loss reads very little of it.

Poetry is so vital to us until school spoils it.

What I wanted to do in rock 'n roll was merge poetry with sonic scapes and the two people who had contributed so much to that were Jimi Hendrix and Jim Morrison.

I came into music because I thought the presentation of poetry wasn't vibrant enough. So I merged improvised poetry with basic rock chords.

When I was younger I felt it was my duty to wake people up. I thought poetry was asleep. I thought rock 'n' roll was asleep.

The cloning of humans is on most of the lists of things to worry about from Science along with behaviour control genetic engineering transplanted heads computer poetry and the unrestrained growth of plastic flowers.

One difference between poetry and lyrics is that lyrics sort of fade into the background. They fade on the page and live on the stage when set to music.

Poetry is not an expression of the party line. It's that time of night lying in bed thinking what you really think making the private world public that's what the poet does.

I always wrote poetry and stuff like that so putting songs together wasn't that spectacular.

You know people speak in poetry all the time. They just don't realize it.

It's something we guys have all done. Made tapes for girls trying to impress them to meet them on a shared plane of aesthetics. Read them someone else's poetry because they do poetry better than you could do it because you're too awkward to do it.

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.