I've always written. When I was in school the only teacher who ever liked me was my creative writing teacher. I used to enter poetry competitions and I don't think I ever lost one. So I had the idea for a while of being some kind of poet.

Writing poetry makes you intensely conscious of how words sound both aloud and inside the head of the reader. You learn the weight of words and how they sound to the ear.

Then I discovered I loved writing poetry more than fiction.

Even the people who have had success and made money writing these books of fiction seem to feel the need to pretend it's no big deal or part of a natural progression from poetry to fiction but often it's really just about the money the perceived prestige.

Well I had this little notion - I started writing when I was eleven writing poetry. I was passionately addicted to it it was my great refuge through adolescence.

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.

The nerds are my favourite sort of boys - any guy with a passion - whether it be physics or film or writing or poetry even I think it's super sweet and it's very attractive for a female.

I like the way words go together and I like the gamesmanship of writing poetry. It is such a challenge.

Gil Thorpe is a great diversion and is to book writing as poetry is to prose.

I don't think you get to good writing unless you expose yourself and your feelings. Deep songs don't come from the surface they come from the deep down. The poetry and the songs that you are suppose to write I believe are in your heart.

I never think about poetry except when I'm writing it. I mean my poetry.

I'm not a writer. I think I can write short stories and poetry but film writing brilliant film writing is a talent - you can't just do it like that.

But one does not make living writing poetry unless you're a professor and one frankly doesn't get a lot of girls as a poet.

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.

Some people swear by writing courses but whether it really helps American poetry I have doubts.

I don't think the creative writing industry has helped American poetry.

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

The Language Poets are writing only about language itself. The Ashbery poets are writing only about poetry itself. That seems to me a kind of dead end.

I think that it's more likely that in my 60s and 70s I will be writing poetry rather than fiction.

On July 26 1916 I announced to all my friends in America that from now on I resolved to write no more poems in the classical language and to begin my experiments in writing poetry in the so-called vulgar tongue of the people.

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.

Unfortunately poetry is not born in noise in crowds or on a bus. There have to be four walls and the certainty that the telephone will not ring. That's what writing is all about.