As for political poetry, as it's usually defined, it seems there's very little good political poetry.

You aren't just the age you are. You are all the ages you ever have been!

I'm a writer who likes to be influenced.

Picasso said once when being interviewed that one should not be one's own connoisseur.

Summer in the trees! “It is time to strangle several bad poets.

When you finish a poem, it clicks shut like the top of a jewel box, but prose is endless. I haven't experienced an awful lot of clicking shut!

Certainly, it seems true enough that there's a good deal of irony in the world... I mean, if you live in a world full of politicians and advertising, there's obviously a lot of deception.

I've had trouble with criticism, I guess. It's hard to know what role criticism plays in either encouraging poets or in getting other people to read them.

Poetry is a deliberate attempt to make language suggestive and imprecise.

One trouble with a kind of falsely therapeutic and always reassuring attitude that it is easy to fall into with old people, is the tendency to be satisfied with too little.

I got married, other people went off. We had sort of another public-we were our entire readership for many years, and we were very excited by each other.

Men are under as strong a compulsion to invent an ethical setting for their behavior as spiders are to weave themselves webs.

Character displays "the weighty impatience of having to explain something that should already be understood.

Emotions are some merciless attention seekers you know.You ignore them they destroy you.

Only grace-large doses, frequently displayed, released-will restore the wounded.

Older generations are living proof that younger generations can survive their lunacy.

Lillian Gish thought that there should be a cabinet position for the arts and I think she was right. I think she was right.

I really didn't know a lot of rock 'n' roll until I moved to L.A. Before that, when I was in New York, I grew up listening mostly to R&B and soul and jazz.

Grace is like a lake of drinkable water right outside your door. But you stay inside and die of thirst.

So the nature required to make a really noble Guardian of our commonwealth will be swift and strong, spirited, and philosophic.

I'm just a big homebody and love word games like Scrabble and Boggle.