I realized poetry's the thing that I can do 'cause I can stick at it and work with tremendous intensity.

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.

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.

Written poetry is different. Best thing is to see it in performance first then read it. Performance is more provocative.

Poetry especially traditional Iranian poetry is very good at looking at things from a number of different angles simultaneously.

Most people can't tell now who wrote what. I like that blurring of identities within the band. because it becomes a unified thing that can't be related to other forms of historical poetry.

I used to write sonnets and various things and moved from there into writing prose which incidentally is a lot more interesting than poetry including the rhythms of prose.

Well the great thing for me about poetry is that in good poems the dislocation of words that is to say the distance between what they say they're saying and what they are actually saying is at its greatest.

A great many people seem to think writing poetry is worthwhile even though it pays next to nothing and is not as widely read as it should be.

Poetry is something that happens in universities in creative writing programs or in English departments.

I've been writing a lot of poetry recently. It helps me think and work things out.

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.

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

Poetry is fascinating. As soon as it begins the poetry has changed the thing into something extra and somehow prose can go over into poetry.

There are so many things that poetry is about one of which is memory.

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.

Auden said poetry makes nothing happen. But I wonder if the opposite could be true. It could make something happen.

It's always good when women win things in fiction because it tends to be more male-dominated unlike poetry which is more equal.

My obsession with time informs my poetry so completely it is hard for me to summarize it. We want time to pass for new things to happen to us we want to hold on to certain moments we don't want our lives to end.

The fact of the matter is that the most unexpected and miraculous thing in my life was the arrival in it of poetry itself - as a vocation and an elevation almost.

It is true that short forms of poetry have been cultivated in the Far East more than in modern Europe but in all European literature short forms of poetry are to be found - indeed quite as short as anything in Japanese.

A lot of people think 'I'll give acting or poetry or filmmaking a try. And if it doesn't work out I'll go get a law degree do something else that's more practical.' For me I went the reverse way. I lived the back-up plan.

I think that's what poetry does. It allows people to come together and identify with a common thing that is outside of themselves but which they identify with from the interior.

I wrote things for the school's newspaper and - like all teenagers - I dabbled in poetry.