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.

My next project is to get back to that. Actually to learn how to write poetry. I'm not kidding.

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.

How does one happen to write a poem: where does it come from? That is the question asked by the psychologists or the geneticists of poetry.

None but a poet can write a tragedy. For tragedy is nothing less than pain transmuted into exaltation by the alchemy of poetry.

The more poetry you have in the head the more poetry you will understand because you will be getting to the roots of what it is that makes people write poetry at all.

My friends never talk to me about my poetry because they're embarrassed that I write it or they're embarrassed by what I write about which are not such extraordinarily terrifying things but they are the state of human existence.

I had art as a major along with English French and History. I had dance modern dance. In English I was allowed to write my own poetry which I eventually got published.

Children can write poetry and then unless they're poets they stop when reach puberty.

Even if you only want to write science fiction you should also read mysteries poetry mainstream literature history biography philosophy and science.

I'm quite sure that most writers would sustain real poetry if they could but it takes devotion and talent.

So I really began as a failed poet - although when I first wanted to be a writer I learned to write prose by reading poetry.

I was a visual artist primarily and a writer even from a very young age. I wrote a lot of stories and poetry and... I had a desire to create always. And I always had a desire to show my work.

When you translate poetry in particular you're obliged to look at how the writer with whom you're working puts together words sentences phrases the triple tension between the line of verse the syntax and the sentence.

I have experienced healing through other writers' poetry but there's no way I can sit down to write in the hope a poem will have healing potential. If I do I'll write a bad poem.

I don't think you get to good writing unless you expose yourself and your feelings. Deep songs don't come from the surface they come from the deep down. The poetry and the songs that you are suppose to write I believe are in your heart.

I hardly remember how I started to write poetry. It's hard to imagine what I thought poetry could do.

I don't write poetry and then strum some chords and then fit the words on top of the chords.

I'm not really one for fancy big words and poetry and the scriptwriters worked very hard on 'Paradise Lost' to translate it.

I know I'm not a wordsmith. And I don't write poetry. Sometimes I think I should because it's really helpful. But I always wanted to write novels.

My favorite subject probably was math. I love math. Figures just intrigue me. I was really good at math. English probably was my worst subject. But I used to write a lot of poetry. I used to write poetry all the time.

I knew what book we had to write it was clear in my head it was journals and poetry. So I passed on their offer. I told my agent this is our vision and no one's done it this way.

There is poetry even in prose in all the great prose which is not merely utilitarian or didactic: there exist poets who write in prose or at least in more or less apparent prose millions of poets write verses which have no connection with poetry.