Radio is such a perfect medium for the transmission of poetry, primarily because there just is the voice, there's no visual distraction.

There are interesting forms of difficulty, and there are unprofitable forms of difficulty. I mean, I enjoy some difficult poetry, but some of it is impenetrable and I actually wouldn't want to penetrate it if I could, perhaps.

Listeners are kind of ambushed... if a poem just happens to be said when they're listening to the radio. The listener doesn't have time to deploy what I call their 'poetry deflector shields' that were installed in high school - there's little time to resist the poem.

I'm pretty much all for poetry in public places - poetry on buses, poetry on subways, on billboards, on cereal boxes.

I think if a poet wanted to lead, he or she would want the message to be unequivocally clear and free of ambiguity. Whereas poetry is actually the home of ambiguity, ambivalence and uncertainty.

We love, you know, children love the ingredients of poetry. And then they go into this tunnel that we call adolescence, and when they come out of it, they hate poetry.

I have my Poetry 180 project, which I've made my main project. We encourage high schools, because that's really where, for most people, poetry dies off and gets buried under other adolescent pursuits.

I don't think anybody reads a book of poetry front to back. Editors and reviewers only. I don't think anybody else does.

I'm happy to stick with my persona. There are themes of love lost and love regained, but the main themes of all poems are basically love and death, and that seems to be the message of poetry.

I know my voice has a limited range of motion; I don't write dramatic monologues and pretend to be other people. But so far, my voice is broad enough to accommodate most of what I want to put into my poetry. I like my persona; I often wish I were him and not me.

When I was a young man, I understood that poetry was two things - it was difficult to understand, but you could understand that the poet was miserable. So for a while there, I wrote poems that were hard to understand, even by me, but gave off whiffs of misery.

One of the disadvantages of poetry over popular music is that if you write a pop song, it naturally gets into people's heads as they listen in the car. You don't have to memorize a Paul Simon song; it's just in your head, and you can sing along. With a poem, you have to will yourself to memorize it.

When I became poet laureate, I was in a slightly uncomfortable position because I think a lot of poetry isn't worth reading.

For most Americans, poetry plays no role in their everyday lives. But also for most Americans, contemporary painting or jazz or sculpture play no role either. I'm not saying poetry is singled out as a special thing to ignore.

People think of poetry as a school subject... Poetry is very frustrating to students because they don't have a taste for ambiguity, for one thing. That gives them a poetry hangover.

My persona is less miserable than a lot of contemporary poetry speakers are.

I'm all for poetry catching up with technology, and just as there are iTunes, I think we should have iPoems. I mean, people should be able to walk around with their earbuds in and listening to poems on their iPod.

I find a lot of poetry very disappointing, but I do have poets that I go back to. One book of poetry that I'd like to mention is 'The Exchange' by Sophie Cabot Black. Her poems are difficult without being too difficult.

In the long revolt against inherited forms that has by now become the narrative of 20th-century poetry in English, no poet was more flamboyant or more recognizable in his iconoclasm than Cummings.

Some honor Cummings as the granddaddy of all American innovators in poetry and ascribe to him a diverse progeny that includes virtually any poet who considers the page a field and allows silence to be part of poetry's expressiveness.

There's something very authentic about humor, when you think about it. Anybody can pretend to be serious. But you can't pretend to be funny.

Humor, for me, is really a gate of departure. It's a way of enticing a reader into a poem so that less funny things can take place later. It really is not an end in itself, but a means to an end.

I'm trying to write poems that involve beginning at a known place, and ending up at a slightly different place. I'm trying to take a little journey from one place to another, and it's usually from a realistic place, to a place in the imagination.

I think more influential than Emily Dickinson or Coleridge or Wordsworth on my imagination were Warner Brothers, Merrie Melodies, and Loony Tunes cartoons.

I broke my nose in gym when a ball hit me. I took a girl to her debutante ball the next week wearing a tux and a big, honking bandage. Not the romantic night she had in mind.

I noticed that I got a better space in the line in Starbucks when I had my tattoo. People associate tattoos with a certain edge. Then I open my mouth, and something completely different comes out.

Confidence is at the root of so many attractive qualities, a sense of humor, a sense of style, a willingness to be who you are no matter what anyone else might think or say and it's true, I do have a certain fondness for women that have dark hair.

The concept of romantic love affords a means of emotional manipulation which the male is free to exploit, since love is the only circumstance in which the female is (ideologically) pardoned for sexual activity.

The great mass of women throughout history have been confined to the cultural level of animal life in providing the male with sexual outlet and exercising the animal functions of reproduction and care of the young.

A sexual revolution begins with the emancipation of women, who are the chief victims of patriarchy, and also with the ending of homosexual oppression.

I think romantic passion is wanting a little something in return.

I come from a place where everything about me, even my body language, is saying: I mean you no harm. I smile, I laugh. Basic stuff for most people.

The vampire was a complete change from the usual romantic characters I was playing, but it was a success.

Women have a predestination to suffering.

I guess I'm pretty much of a lone wolf. I don't say I don't like people at all, but, to tell you the truth, I only like it then if I have a chance to look deep into their hearts and their minds.

If my accent betrayed my foreign birth, it also stamped me as an enemy, in the imagination of the producers.

I think a nice romantic dinner should be saved for when you and the girl you're dating or seeing have something special and it's a more special occasion.

Normally, things are viewed in these little segmented boxes. There's classical, and then there's jazz; romantic, and then there's baroque. I find that very dissatisfying. I was trying to find the thread that connects one type of music - one type of musician - to another, and to follow that thread in some kind of natural, evolutionary way.

That on a romantic level, if you feel it about somebody and it's pure, it means that they do too.

Somewhere along the line, the actions of this government are the actions of me.

Marriage ain't easy, but it's great most of the time.

Anger can be a problem, but it has tremendous potential, too. It's just figuring out what to do with it.

We've let the blade of our innocence dull over time, and it's only in innocence that you find any kind of magic, any kind of courage.

Child-rearing is my main interest now. I'm a hands-on father.

I would love to play the lead in a big romantic comedy. That's definitely a dream of mine.

Anger is not an accepted thing for women. And, you know, I do get angry. I feel it's a very honest emotion.

I've been doing Pride and Prejudice all summer, so suddenly the chance to be holed up with a bunch of marines is quite attractive, and probably a necessary dose of male energy.

And I like the look on people's faces when I say I'm doing this movie called Pride and Prejudice and they kind of smile, and then I say I'm in a movie called Doom and they kind of do a double take and try and put the two things together. And they never quite manage to.

I thought being a cowboy would be a terribly romantic thing to do. But it wasn't. I shoveled a lot of stalls.

For a romantic comedy to be three hours long, that's longer than most marriages.