If somebody honks a horn in Cleveland, they're saying 'Hi.' It's so rare to be honked at in anger. When we have merging traffic, we just interweave. There's real courtesy.

Lapped in poetry, wrapped in the picturesque, armed with logical sentences and inalienable words.

Twentieth-century American poetry has been one of the glories of modern literature.

When you begin to write poems because you love language, because you love poetry. Something happens that makes you write poems. And the writing of poems is incredibly pleasurable and addictive.

Poems have a different music from ordinary language, and every poem has a different kind of music of necessity, and that's, in a way, the hardest thing about writing poetry is waiting for that music, and sometimes you never know if it's going to come.

I think poetry always lives its life, and people come to it and people go away from it, 'people' in the sense of larger numbers of people. It's as though you begin to think that poetry is a resource, and that at certain times people seem to need it or want it or can find sustenance in it, and at other times they can't.

My father read poetry to me, encouraged me to memorize poems. But the writing of it was quite a different thing.

My strong suits, coming from poetry, will naturally be description, which I love doing. It comes very easily, and possibly structure, up to a point.

I think that I have less conviction than ever that poetry matters - that poetry changes or saves anything or anyone. But, in fact, that's tremendously freeing. If it doesn't matter much, the stakes are lower and you can't really fail. It's insurrection. It's a tiny alphabet revolution. A secret. A psalm.

My father had wanted to name me for Dylan Thomas. He had seen him speak on one of those drunken poetry tours he did.

Poetry is a pure meritocracy. There's no room for ambiguity: either a poem moves you and opens up new vistas in life, or it doesn't. It's completely objective, and the best always rise to the top.

Poetry operates by hints and dark suggestions. It is full of secrets and hidden formulae, like a witch's brew.

What does that represent? There was never any question in plastic art, in poetry, in music, of representing anything. It is a matter of making something beautiful, moving, or dramatic - this is by no means the same thing.

In poetry, I have, since very young, loved poetry in translation. The Chinese, the French, the Russians, Italians, Indians and early Celts: the formality of the translator's voice, their measured breath and anxiety moves me as it lingers over the original.

Don't call my lyrics poetry. It's an insult to real poets.

Poetry is like making a joke. If you get one word wrong at the end of a joke, you've lost the whole thing.

I think of something quite different from a snapshot. I know of a lot of poems, some very fine ones, that are like snapshots, but I'm more interested in poetry that is like an endless film, long stories, things that weave together many different strands, like a big piece of cloth, not like a photograph.

The musician is perhaps the most modest of animals, but he is also the proudest. It is he who invented the sublime art of ruining poetry.

I wrote some bad poetry that I published in North African journals, but even as I withdrew into this reading, I also led the life of a kind of young hooligan.

Well, I like to write poetry. I'm a published poet.

Usually, I am a compulsive person, and I need - sometimes urgently - to paint... Painting is close to poetry, is a kind of poetry expressed visually. It has to be spontaneous, rapid - at least in my case.

I like poetry when I don't quite understand why I like it. Poetry isn't just a question of wrapping something up and giving it to someone else to unwrap. It just doesn't work like that.

Use your imagination, and you'll see that even the most narrow, humdrum lives are infinite in scope if you examine them with enough care.

It is certain that at certain times talent entirely overcomes thought or poetry.

He could not die when trees were green, for he loved the time too well.

If life had a second edition, how I would correct the proofs.

Character is the ability to carry out a good resolution long after the excitement of the moment has passed.

If you asked me for my New Year Resolution, it would be to find out who I am.

Let our New Year's resolution be this: we will be there for one another as fellow members of humanity, in the finest sense of the word.

Accept what people offer. Drink their milkshakes. Take their love.

New Year's Resolution: To tolerate fools more gladly, provided this does not encourage them to take up more of my time.

You're in high school, and you're telling your friends that you're skipping lunch to go write poetry, and they were all questioning my sexuality.

My brand of humor is trying to play the situation as real as possible because I'm not the type of guy who is a joke a minute.

I guess I've kind of recognized what my worth is and what my specific brand of humor is. And that's not necessarily being the guy who's super witty and saying a joke every second. I'm the guy who you throw in a bizarre scenario, and I'll play it as real as possible.

None but a poet can write a tragedy. For tragedy is nothing less than pain transmuted into exaltation by the alchemy of poetry.

Faith is not belief. Belief is passive. Faith is active.

I think it comes from really liking literary forms. Poetry is very beautiful, but the space on the page can be as affecting as where the text is. Like when Miles Davis doesn't play, it has a poignancy to it.

If you go into a bar in most places in America and even say the word poetry, you'll probably get beaten up. But poetry is a really strong, beautiful form to me, and a lot of innovation in language comes from poetry.

I didn't get my degree at NYU; I got it later, they gave me an honourary one.

If you read quickly to get through a poem to what it means, you have missed the body of the poem.

When I was a graduate student, the leading spirits at Harvard were interested in the history of ideas.

You don't help people in your poems. I've been trying to help people all my life - that's my trouble.

I think that one possible definition of our modern culture is that it is one in which nine-tenths of our intellectuals can't read any poetry.

I was quiet, and I was artistic. I liked writing poetry, and that was very strange, so I was bullied a lot.

The poetry I grew up on is really an intense form of poetry; it's so pure and powerful.

I have moments of darkness, of anger, and moments of rage. They do creep up at the most inopportune times. Not to recognize that in my music would give people a sense of sainthood that I don't necessarily have or even want to have.

I really enjoy English and poetry and writing classes.

There'll always be working people in my poems because I grew up with them, and I am a poet of memory.

In politics, as in poetry, it is sometimes true that it is darkest before dawn.

From my music training, I knew that, some Spanish rhythms apart, 5/4 is a time signature used only in the modern era. Holst's Mars from the Planets is 5/4. But if you speak lines of poetry in that pattern you just end up hitting the off-beats. It's only when you add a rest - a sixth beat - that it sounds as it surely should sound.