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.

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

I work on words mostly toward them being poetry or short stories and then some of those become songs. They all find their place in the world but they all start off in the same place. I'm always painting and drawing as well and it's an ongoing creative assignment.

When you translate poetry in particular you're obliged to look at how the writer with whom you're working puts together words sentences phrases the triple tension between the line of verse the syntax and the sentence.

I don't write poetry and then strum some chords and then fit the words on top of the chords.

I'm not really one for fancy big words and poetry and the scriptwriters worked very hard on 'Paradise Lost' to translate it.

I know I'm not a wordsmith. And I don't write poetry. Sometimes I think I should because it's really helpful. But I always wanted to write novels.

That sense of a life in natural objects which in most poetry is but a rhetorical artifice was then in Wordsworth the assertion of what was for him almost literal fact.

I love to compare different time frames. Poetry can evoke the time of the subject. By a very careful choice of words you can evoke an era completely throw the poem into a different time scale.

Poetry is a form of mathematics a highly rigorous relationship with words.

Poetry is not only a set of words which are chosen to relate to each other it is something which goes much further than that to provide a glimpse of our vision of the world.

Have you ever heard a good joke? If you've ever heard someone just right with the right pacing then you're already on the way to poetry. It's about using words in very precise ways and using gesture.

A theology should be like poetry which takes us to the end of what words and thoughts can do.

In poetry you must love the words the ideas and the images and rhythms with all your capacity to love anything at all.

You pick up loads of baggage with your first record with reaction to it from fans and critics. So I went to Ireland by myself for a couple of weeks with my guitar. I read lots of poetry I read Patti Smith's autobiography and started words and phrases and then songs started to take shape.

Poetry involves the mysteries of the irrational perceived through rational words.

I wish our clever young poets would remember my homely definitions of prose and poetry that is prose = words in their best order - poetry = the best words in the best order.

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.

As an actor there is room for a certain amount of creativity but you're always ultimately going to be saying somebody else's words. I don't think I'd have the stamina skill or ability to write a novel but I'd love to write short stories and poetry because those are my two passions.

Poetry is an orphan of silence. The words never quite equal the experience behind them.

We all write poems it is simply that poets are the ones who write in words.

You don't make a poem with ideas but with words.

Poets are soldiers that liberate words from the steadfast possession of definition.

Poetry is thoughts that breathe and words that burn.