A lyric it is true is the expression of personal emotion but then so is all poetry and to suppose that there are several kinds of poetry differing from each other in essence is to be deceived by wholly artificial divisions which have no real being.

Poetry can't cure cancer but it can save your life until you die.

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

I was in Paris at an English-language bookstore. I picked up a volume of Dickinson's poetry. I came back to my hotel read 2 000 of her poems and immediately began composing in my head. I wrote down the melodies even before I got to a piano.

Theater is far superior to film in poetry in abstract poetry.

On a summer night it can be lovely to sit around outside with friends after dinner and yes read poetry to each other. Keats and Yeats will never let you down but it's differently exciting to read the work of poets who are still walking around out there.

The whole thing about making films in an organic film on location is that it's not all about characters relationships and themes it's also about place and the poetry of place. It's about the spirit of what you find the accidents of what you stumble across.

Music is my thing. It's my thing it's what I love. It's what I do. It's football to me it's Christmas to me religion to me poetry to me.

I have been enlightened. I have fallen into poetry and it has swallowed me up.

In politics as in poetry it is sometimes true that it is darkest before dawn.

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

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.

I guess I wanted to leave America for awhile. It wasn't that I wanted to become an expatriate or just never come back I needed some breathing room. I'd already been translating French poetry I'd been to Paris once before and liked it very much and so I just went.

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.

I don't live for poetry. I live far more than anybody else does.

We simply have not kept in touch with poetry.

The other side of it is that despite all that people reach out to poetry at the key moments in their lives.

That's one of the great things about poetry one realises that one does one's little turn - that you're just part of the great crop as it were.

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

In my opinion the most significant works of the twentieth century are those that rise beyond the conceptual tyranny of genre they are at the same time poetry criticism narrative drama etc.

My art and poetry is very political now. Because you've got to find that truth within you and express yourself. Somewhere out there I know there will be people who will listen.

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

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.

Meet some people who care about poetry the way you do. You'll have that readership. Keep going until you know you're doing work that's worthy. And then see what happens. That's my advice.