I read as much poetry as time allows and circumstance dictates: No heartache can pass without a little Dorothy Parker, no thunderstorm without W. H. Auden, no sleepless night without W. B. Yeats.

I was raised on songs of poetry like Simon and Garfunkel and Cat Stevens and Neil Young, etc. I love those old songs probably the most because they hit me so deep down in my core.

Learn poetry by heart. If you know a poem by heart, no one can take it away from you, and you can take advantage of it anytime.

Great poetry is always written by somebody straining to go beyond what he can do.

Modernism in other arts brought extreme difficulty. In poetry, the characteristic difficulty imported under the name of modernism was obscurity. But obscurity could just as easily be a quality of metrical as of free verse.

When we study Shakespeare on the page, for academic purposes, we may require all kinds of help. Generally, we read him in modern spelling and with modern punctuation, and with notes. But any poetry that is performed - from song lyric to tragic speech - must make its point, as it were, without reference back.

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.

Rap is rhythm and poetry. Hip-hop is storytelling and poetry as well.

Poetry is the art which is technically within the grasp of everyone: a piece of paper and a pencil and one is ready.

However, poetry does not live solely in books or in school anthologies.

I do not go in search of poetry. I wait for poetry to visit me.

Slowly poetry becomes visual because it paints images, but it is also musical: it unites two arts into one.

I will not leave a corner of my consciousness covered up, but saturate myself with the strange and extraordinary new conditions of this life, and it will all refine itself into poetry later on.

There is the view that poetry should improve your life. I think people confuse it with the Salvation Army.

I don't look on poetry as closed works. I feel they're going on all the time in my head and I occasionally snip off a length.

Poetry is necessary, but is the poet?

What we know is that Shakespeare wrote perhaps the most remarkable body of passionate love poetry in the English language to a young man.

I believe in broken, fractured, complicated narratives, but I believe in narratives as a vehicle for truth, not simply as a form of entertainment, though I love entertainment, but also a way of conveying what needs to be conveyed about the works that I care about.

On the other hand, if there's an underlying core of poetry that I go to, I go to the sea. I've lived on the sea all my life. I live on the sea in Cape Breton.

And certainly the history of public sculpture has been disastrous but that doesn't mean it ought not to continue and the only way it even has a chance to continue is if the work gets out into the public.

I think you always have to find where the boundary is in relation to the context in order to be able to kind of articulate how you want the space to interact with the viewer.

As far as I am concerned, poetry is a statement concerning the human condition, composed in verse.

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.

Pound's translation of Chinese poetry was maybe the most important thing I read. Eliot a little bit later.

If a poem is not memorable, there's probably something wrong. One of the problems of free verse is that much of the free verse poetry is not memorable.

Philip Larkin has a tough honesty and sense of humor that I find irresistible, as a contemporary poet.

I entered a poem in a poetry contest around 1987, and the poem won and I received $1,000 for it. That made me realize that maybe what I was writing was worth reading to people. After that, for some reason, I turned to novels and I've written mainly novels ever since.

Who writes poetry imbibes honey from the poisoned lips of life.

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

We have a motto at Naropa: 'Keep the world safe for poetry.' It's humorous but has some real bite to it. If the world is safe for poetry, it can be safe for many other things.

Let me read you some of my poetry. My poetry just takes me to another level.

I've always loved the poetry in 'Pale Fire.' I think it's wonderful.

Be patient, work hard and consistently, have faith in your writing, and don't be afraid to listen to constructive criticism.

With my fiction, I focused on chapters and overall conceptions, while in poetry, I crawled along in the trenches of each sentence, examining every word for a sign of a deeper significance.

I do think that there is a profound reservoir of creativity and imagination in everyone I've ever met, and sometimes if someone is persistent and perversely obstinate enough to persevere, then they want to be helped. There is a way to help them.

Bleak House is just the most astounding piece of work. There's huge, visionary poetry in it.

Children can write poetry and then, unless they're poets, they stop when reach puberty.

I think that's what poetry does. It allows people to come together and identify with a common thing that is outside of themselves, but which they identify with from the interior.

I define poetry as celebration and confrontation. When we witness something, are we responsible for what we witness? That's an on-going existential question. Perhaps we are and perhaps there's a kind of daring, a kind of necessary energetic questioning. Because often I say it's not what we know, it's what we can risk discovering.

Students often have such a lofty idea of what a poem is, and I want them to realize that their own lives are where the poetry comes from. The most important things are to respect the language; to know the classical rules, even if only to break them; and to be prepared to edit, to revise, to shape.

Poetry helps me understand who I am. It helps me understand the world around me. But above all, what poetry has taught me is the fact that I need to embrace mystery in order to be completely human.

I originally wanted to embrace the imagery and forthrightness of rap music. There are some interesting, dynamic voices in rap. But I find most of it irresponsible in its overt violence and commercialization of anger. As artists, we believe we can will action through language. If that's the case, we have to take responsibility for what we say.

Through the years I have seen myself as a peaceful person, but the awareness of the anger is part of that process.

Poetry is at least an elegance and at most a revelation.

I think there's no excuse for the American poetry reader not knowing a good deal about what is going on in the rest of the world.

Of course a poem is a two-way street. No poem is any good if it doesn't suggest to the reader things from his own mind and recollection that he will read into it, and will add to what the poet has suggested. But I do think poetry readings are very important.

Nothing I had written before 'Mary Poppins' had anything to do with children, and I have always assumed, when I thought about it at all, that she had come out of the same wall of nothingness as the poetry, myth and legend that had absorbed me all my writing life.

If you were going to choose a way of making your way in this world and a place to start from, you might not choose poetry and you might not choose Huddersfield.

It reminds me to say that staying local should never be about looking at the world through a closed window, but about making a home then throwing the doors open and inviting the world in.

When we were 15, my girlfriend Ruth Kaplan and I applied to the Universidad Ibero-Americana in Mexico City. We were accepted into a program that placed us with a lovely Mexican family. We lived with them for six weeks while studying Spanish poetry and Mexican anthropology.