Memory and poetry go together, absolutely. It is a matter of preserving and of remembering things.

The relation between a poet and audience is really insignificant. What matters is the poet is hearing something that he is broadcasting. And whether there is anybody with a receiver isn't the reason he does it. He hopes there is somebody receiving it.

Film and TV are the most popular mediums in America. Literature and poetry are possibly the most under-recognized art forms.

We are not concerned with the very poor. They are unthinkable, and only to be approached by the statistician or the poet.

The way to praise a poet is to write a poem.

Poetry always runs away from you - it's very difficult to grasp it, and every time you read it, depending on your conditions, you will have a different grasp of it. Whereas with a novel, once you have read it, you have grasped it.

A true poet does not bother to be poetical. Nor does a nursery gardener scent his roses.

I want to promote poetry to the point where you got all the baldhead kids running around doing poetry, getting the music out of the way and having only words, the spoken word, and then see what happens.

I liked painting and drawing, and I liked humanities mainly - poetry, literature - this speculative attitude toward life.

Writing criticism is to writing fiction and poetry as hugging the shore is to sailing in the open sea.

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

While I was in junior high, I wrote an entire essay in rhyme about manufacturing in New York State. In high school, I won a Scholastic poetry contest.

There is something about poetry beyond prose logic, there is mystery in it, not to be explained but admired.

One of the most treasured books that I own is Donald Allen's 'The New American Poetry, 1945-1960.' It was a totem of great importance and potency to my group of writer friends in college from 1960 to 1964.

The young people have MTV and rock and roll. Why would they go to read poetry? Poetry belongs to the Stone Age. It awakens in us perceptions that go back to those times.

I think poetry can help children deal with the other subjects on the curriculum by enabling them to see a subject in a new way.

I work with a lot of young people who have poems that are changing their lives, that they're eager to talk about, but every now and then when I meet someone, maybe someone of my parents' generation, and I tell them that I write poetry, they'll begin to recite something that they memorized when they were in school that has never left them.

I'm happy to be a writer - of prose, poetry, every kind of writing. Every person in the world who isn't a recluse, hermit or mute uses words. I know of no other art form that we always use.

There have always been great defenses of poetry, and I've tried to write mine, and I think all of my work and criticism is a defense of poetry to try and keep something alive in poetry.

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.