The world of politics is always twenty years behind the world of thought.

The 'democracy gap' in our politics and elections spells a deep sense of powerlessness by people who drop out do not vote or listlessly vote for the 'least worst' every four years and then wonder why after every cycle the 'least worst' gets worse.

I learnt more about politics during one South Dakota dust storm than in seven years at the university.

If a politician murders his mother the first response of the press or of his opponents will likely be not that it was a terrible thing to do but rather that in a statement made six years before he had gone on record as being opposed to matricide.

Politics it seems to me for years or all too long has been concerned with right or left instead of right or wrong.

If you have always believed that everyone should play by the same rules and be judged by the same standards that would have gotten you labeled a radical 60 years ago a liberal 30 years ago and a racist today.

I started off in England and very few people knew I was Australian. I mean the clues were in the poems but they didn't read them very carefully and so for years and years I was considered completely part of the English poetry scene.

Poetry's always dead you know? You don't realize how good poetry is until 15 years later.

Well - I started writing - probably in the early 60s and by say '65-'66 I had read most of the poetry that had been published - certainly in the 20 years prior to that.

Let my life as Poet begin. I want the life of the Poet. I have labored for over twelve years one thousand pages of prose. Now I want the easiness of poetry. The brevity of the poem.

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 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.

Once every five hundred years or so a summary statement about poetry comes along that we can't imagine ourselves living without.

I published privately a collection of my serious poetry I had written over the years. I only published 50 copies which I gave to friends in a special deluxe edition. It was ridiculously expensive but I'm glad that I did it.

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.

There is probably nothing wrong with art for art's sake if we take the phrase seriously and not take it to mean the kind of poetry written in England forty years ago.

Today the U.S. is farther from being nourished by poetry than it was a hundred years ago when books of poems were best-sellers.

I was very interested in American poetry for many years. Much less now.

I don't think American poetry has gotten any better in the past 35 years. Oddly enough creative writing programs seem to have been good for fiction and I would not have predicted that.

Teaching writing over the years intrudes on your own writing in important ways taking away some of the excitement of poetry.

In my late teenage years I developed a real passion for it and wrote a lot of poetry.

I thought to spend my declining years writing poetry and teaching - but that won't pay the Bergdorf's bill. I think I'll move to somewhere life is cheaper.

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.

To this day I don't ever remember seeing a pet inside Moscow I never saw anyone carrying a dog or leading a dog. Err I finally saw a a pet some years later in Kiev so I thought that life must have been different.