Everything is complicated if that were not so life and poetry and everything else would be a bore.

I think there are things in my story that have helped my creativity. Your father being killed for instance is one of the best things that could happen to a kid if he's going to write poetry or songs.

The cloning of humans is on most of the lists of things to worry about from Science along with behaviour control genetic engineering transplanted heads computer poetry and the unrestrained growth of plastic flowers.

It's something we guys have all done. Made tapes for girls trying to impress them to meet them on a shared plane of aesthetics. Read them someone else's poetry because they do poetry better than you could do it because you're too awkward to do it.

In poetry everything which must be said is almost impossible to say well.

I have written some songs but I would really call what I've done poetry at the end of the day because I'll sit with my guitar for hours and hours on end for like a week and then I won't touch it for a month. I also just have no confidence. And you know what? I don't have time because I'd rather be doing other things like knitting.

When you're going through something whether it's a wonderful thing like having a child or a sad thing like losing somebody you often feel like 'Oh my God I'm so overwhelmed I'm dealing with this huge thing on my own.' In fact poetry's a nice reminder that no everybody goes through it. These are universal experiences.

I certainly derived my skills as a prose writer from my scrutiny of poetry and of the individual word. But schools don't do things like that anymore - tracking words down to their roots.

I have nothing to say I am saying it and that is poetry.

The only thing that can save the world is the reclaiming of the awareness of the world. That's what poetry does.

Poetry must have something in it that is barbaric vast and wild.

Nothing truly convincing - which would possess thoroughness vigor and skill - has been written against the ancients as yet especially not against their poetry.

Poetry consists in a rhyming dictionary and things seen.

But I liked Yeats! That wild Irishman. I really loved his love of language his flow. His chaotic ideas seemed to me just the right thing for a poet. Passion! He was always on the right side. He may be wrongheaded but his heart was always on the right side. He wrote beautiful poetry.

Poetry is the work of poets not of peoples or communities artistic creation can never be anything but the production of an individual mind.

Poetry is as precise a thing as geometry.

Every now and then I read a poem that does touch something in me but I never turn to poetry for solace or pleasure in the way that I throw myself into prose.

Poetry should be great and unobtrusive a thing which enters into one's soul and does not startle it or amaze it with itself but with its subject.

In science one tries to tell people in such a way as to be understood by everyone something that no one ever knew before. But in poetry it's the exact opposite.

The greatest thing a human soul ever does in this world... to see clearly is poetry prophecy and religion all in one.

The Bible should be taught but emphatically not as reality. It is fiction myth poetry anything but reality. As such it needs to be taught because it underlies so much of our literature and our culture.

As things are and as fundamentally they must always be poetry is not a career but a mug's game. No honest poet can ever feel quite sure of the permanent value of what he has written: He may have wasted his time and messed up his life for nothing.

If my poetry aims to achieve anything it's to deliver people from the limited ways in which they see and feel.

Listen real poetry doesn't say anything it just ticks off the possibilities. Opens all doors. You can walk through anyone that suits you.