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

The most shocking fact about war is that its victims and its instruments are individual human beings and that these individual beings are condemned by the monstrous conventions of politics to murder or be murdered in quarrels not their own.

I'm always rather nervous about how you talk about women who are active in politics whether they want to be talked about as women or as politicians.

The United States brags about its political system but the President says one thing during the election something else when he takes office something else at midterm and something else when he leaves.

I have been thinking that I would make a proposition to my Republican friends... that if they will stop telling lies about the Democrats we will stop telling the truth about them.

Poetry asks people to have values form opinions care about some other part of experience besides making money and being successful on the job.

So much of my poetry begins with something that I can describe in visual terms so thinking about distance thinking about how life begins and what might be watching us.

I think it was T.S. Eliot who talked about good poetry being felt before it's understood. I believe that. There are some bands where I love their lyrics but I don't have a clue what they're on about.

One of the things I've always liked about my husband is he's very good at lots of stuff. He was an English teacher when I met him. He wrote poetry and played the guitar. As time went on he decided to go into economics so he's very analytical and mathematical in addition to his artsy side.

All I knew about Ethiopia was from a few records that I like as well as what I read about the famine. But you get there and it's another world. It's filled with art and music and poetry and intellectuals and writers - all kinds of people.

If I do a poetry reading I want people to walk out and say they feel better for having been there - not because you've done a comedy performance but because you're talking about your father dying or having young children things that touch your soul.

All the modern verse plays they're terrible they're mostly about the poetry. It's more important that the play is first.

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.

Probably induced by the asthma I started reading and writing early on my literary efforts from the age of about nine running chiefly to poetry and plays.

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 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.

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 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.

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.

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.

The poet exposes himself to the risk. All that has been said about poetry all that he has learned about poetry is only a partial assurance.

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

Conventional wisdom notwithstanding there is no reason either in football or in poetry why the two should not meet in a man's life if he has the weight and cares about the words.