It is enough that the people know there was an election. The people who cast the votes decide nothing. The people who count the votes decide everything.

Short fiction is the medium I love the most because it requires that I bring everything I've learned about poetry - the concision the ability to say something as vividly as possible - but also the ability to create a narrative that though lacking a novel's length satisfies the reader.

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.

No what I should really like to do right now in the full blaze of lights before this illustrious assembly is to shower every one of you with gifts with flowers with offerings of poetry - to be young once more to ride on the crest of the wave.

At this point we've answered about every question you could possibly imagine about Deep Space Nine so we do this thing called Theatrical Jazz where we do a show of bits and pieces of things from plays and literature poetry... stuff that we like. It's fun.

The irony is going to work every day became the subject of probably my best poetry.

Besides the actual reading in class of many poems I would suggest you do two things: first while teaching everything you can and keeping free of it teach that poetry is a mode of discourse that differs from logical exposition.

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

Journalism wishes to tell what it is that has happened everywhere as though the same things had happened for every man. Poetry wishes to say what it is like for any man to be himself in the presence of a particular occurrence as though only he were alone there.

I'm not really quiet or shy. Ask any of my friends! But I always ground my poetry in life itself. Poetry is an art of language though so I am always aware of every word's meaning or multiple meanings.

I began the way nearly everybody I ever heard of - I began writing poetry. And I find that to be quite usual with writers their trying their hand at poetry.

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.