I think I'm a very good reader of poetry but obviously like everybody I have a set of criteria for reading poems and I'm not shy about presenting them so if people ask for my critical response to a poem I tell them what works and why and what doesn't work and why.

Every so often I find some poems that are too good for the readers of The Atlantic because they are a little too involved with the nature of poetry as such.

Poetry should be able to reach everybody and it should be able to appeal to all levels of understanding.

You can find poetry in your everyday life your memory in what people say on the bus in the news or just what's in your heart.

There is an urgent need for Americans to look deeply into themselves and their actions and musical poetry is perhaps the most effective mirror available. Every newspaper headline is a potential song.

Poetry always runs away from you - it's very difficult to grasp it and every time you read it depending on your conditions you will have a different grasp of it. Whereas with a novel once you have read it you have grasped it.

The middle class is doing fine in fiction. But it's not what gets me going. I love the working class and everyone from it I've met and think they're incredibly witty inventive - there's a lot of poetry there.

Poetry is the art which is technically within the grasp of everyone: a piece of paper and a pencil and one is ready.

I have piles of poetry books in the bathroom on the stairs everywhere. The only way to write poetry is to read it.

In the language of poetry where every word is weighed nothing is usual or normal. Not a single stone and not a single cloud above it. Not a single day and not a single night after it. And above all not a single existence not anyone's existence in this world.

Everyone needs solitude especially a person who is used to thinking about what she experiences. Solitude is very important in my work as a mode of inspiration but isolation is not good in this respect. I am not writing poetry about isolation.

Poetry is above all a concentration of the power of language which is the power of our ultimate relationship to everything in the universe.

While also importantly not wanting to dumb it down or pretend the days of 'difficult' poetry are over because we live in a pluralist culture and there's room for 'difficult' poetry alongside rap and everything else. And poetry won't be for everyone but everyone should have the choice.

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

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

In poetry everything which must be said is almost impossible to say well.

When you're going through something whether it's a wonderful thing like having a child or a sad thing like losing somebody you often feel like 'Oh my God I'm so overwhelmed I'm dealing with this huge thing on my own.' In fact poetry's a nice reminder that no everybody goes through it. These are universal experiences.

Every American poet feels that the whole responsibility for contemporary poetry has fallen upon his shoulders that he is a literary aristocracy of one.

Every now and then I read a poem that does touch something in me but I never turn to poetry for solace or pleasure in the way that I throw myself into prose.

In science one tries to tell people in such a way as to be understood by everyone something that no one ever knew before. But in poetry it's the exact opposite.

Poetry surrounds us everywhere but putting it on paper is alas not so easy as looking at it.

Everyone thinks they're going to write one book of poems or one novel.

Every single soul is a poem.

Everything one invents is true you may be perfectly sure of that. Poetry is as precise as geometry.