I think that one possible definition of our modern culture is that it is one in which nine-tenths of our intellectuals can't read any poetry.

I'd never really been content with just churning out these slim volumes every three or four years. I've always tried to think of poetry as an active ingredient in the language rather than just something that appears between the covers of thin books.

I have epiphanies all the time because I'm always thinking. I'm a thinker. I'm always writing poetry I'm always coming to conclusions.

Of course a poem is a two-way street. No poem is any good if it doesn't suggest to the reader things from his own mind and recollection that he will read into it and will add to what the poet has suggested. But I do think poetry readings are very important.

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.

I think there's no excuse for the American poetry reader not knowing a good deal about what is going on in the rest of the world.

I think that is where poetry reading becomes such an individual thing. I mean I have friend who like poets who just don't say anything to me at all I mean they seem to me rather ordinary and pedestrian.

I think that concrete poetry seems to have as far as I can see come to a kind of a dead end. It doesn't seem to be going any further than it went in its high period of about five or six years ago.

I think Ginsberg has done more harm to the craft that I honor and live by than anybody else by reducing it to a kind of mean that enables the most dubious practitioners to claim they are poets because they think If the kind of thing Ginsberg does is poetry I can do that.

There is the view that poetry should improve your life. I think people confuse it with the Salvation Army.

I thought we were gonna open up the world of poetry and music to all kinds of things and yet I can't really think of anyone who's done anything like it since.

Now I think poetry will save nothing from oblivion but I keep writing about the ordinary because for me it's the home of the extraordinary the only home.

I've always written. When I was in school the only teacher who ever liked me was my creative writing teacher. I used to enter poetry competitions and I don't think I ever lost one. So I had the idea for a while of being some kind of poet.

I've often entertained paranoid suspicions about my fridge and what it's been doing to my poetry when I'm not looking but I never even considered that my fan was thinking about me.

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.

A great many people seem to think writing poetry is worthwhile even though it pays next to nothing and is not as widely read as it should be.

I think the best American poetry is the poetry that utilizes the resources of poetry rather than exploits the defects or triumphs of the poet's personality.

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.

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.

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.

But I don't think that poetry is a good to use a contemporary word venue for current events.

I think poetry is best read to oneself.

I've been writing a lot of poetry recently. It helps me think and work things out.