Country music especially can get very formulaic - you know, you have to have your verses and a bridge and a chorus, and a lot of the songs are written as just plain and simple poetry on the road.

I love poetry. If my mind gets a bit tight or bound up with information or depressed with bad news, I find a good book of poetry is like going to the gym for an hour. My mind just expands.

I often say poetry was my first love.

I am addicted to poetry, but the truth is I cannot pass up a good hard-boiled mystery.

I studied English at the College of Wooster in Ohio, and I did an M.F.A. in Poetry at Columbia.

A group of us started a community center in Santa Monica. We've tried different programs, and three have worked really well. A poetry group. Once a week we visit Venice High and talk to girls at risk.

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.

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.

We all need poetry. The moments in our lives that are characterized by language that has to do with necessity or the market, or just, you know, things that take us away from the big questions that we have, those are the things that I think urge us to think about what a poem can offer.

Lately, I've been thinking about the difference between poetry and prose, and as I've experienced it, poetry is insistent. It allows for images and statements to operate in a single space and resonate powerfully without the application to be elaborated upon and narrated.

I wanted to write the kind of poetry that people read and remembered, that they lived by - the kinds of lines that I carried with me from moment to moment on a given day without even having chosen to.

What excites me is that I'm an ambassador for poetry, which is something that I wholeheartedly believe in and that has been an anchor and a force of stability and consolation throughout my life. I think that's good news.

I know my curiosity as a writer and as a person makes me really interested in moving to parts of the country that I haven't explored through writers' festivals or through the kind of campus visits that I do on a regular basis and engaging with people who may be readers of poetry and may not.

I go to a lot of writers conferences and literary festivals that tend to be in college towns or cities, and I'm eager to see what happens if those same texts and those same questions move outside of those areas to smaller rural communities where there are surely people who read and love poetry.

Poetry is not the language we live in. It's not the language of our day-to-day errand-running and obligation-fulfilling, not the language with which we are asked to justify ourselves to the outside world. It certainly isn't the language to which commercial value has been assigned.

One of poetry's great effects, through its emphasis upon feeling, association, music, and image - things we recognize and respond to even before we understand why - is to guide us toward the part of ourselves so deeply buried that it borders upon the collective.

Listening to music and lyrics and watching movies, I think, uses a lot of the same muscles we use in reading and experiencing poetry - and yet we somehow forget that we have those when it comes to sitting down with a book of poems.

I can find some way to make poetry out of my life's experiences.

I had always been literary, in the sense of loving poetry and discovering novels, but I found my voice, as they say, in an office full of elderly people who looked after blind ex-servicemen.

I read pretty eclectically - fiction, non-fiction, and poetry - and I've been inspired and influenced by a number of writers.

I think it's often assumed that the role of poetry is to comfort, but for me, poetry is the great unsettler. It questions the established order of the mind. It is radical, by which I don't mean that it is either leftwing or rightwing, but that it works at the roots of thinking.

The poet may be used as a barometer, but let us not forget that he is also part of the weather.

One will never again look at a birch tree, after the Robert Frost poem, in exactly the same way.

Poetry is ordinary language raised to the Nth power. Poetry is boned with ideas, nerved and blooded with emotions, all held together by the delicate, tough skin of words.

I wanted to write poetry almost a little more than I wanted to eat.

All poetry is an ordered voice, one which tries to tell you about a vision in the un-visionary language of farm, city, and love.

There is a wonderful Hungarian literature, especially in lyric poetry.

I never think about poetry except when I'm writing it. I mean my poetry.

I think poetry is best read to oneself.

No poem is easily grasped; so why should any reader expect fast results?

Sometimes poetry is inspired by the conversation entered into by reading other poems.

An experienced reader uses the poem as an agent of inquiry. This makes poetry very exciting, unstable, and interactive.

Poetry is but another form of inquiry into the nature of phenomena, using with its own unique procedures and tools.

In the past, poetry came in the form of spells and chants used to effect change.

If poetry alters the way in which the reader views the world, then it has had its desired effect.

My obsession with time informs my poetry so completely it is hard for me to summarize it. We want time to pass, for new things to happen to us, we want to hold on to certain moments, we don't want our lives to end.

I like poems that are little games.

I think poetry has lost an awful lot of its muscle because nobody knows any. Nobody has to memorize poetry.

Each word bears its weight, so you have to read my poems quite slowly.

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

I think what will happen is that fiction will become more like poetry. As in, the only people who read it will write it.

Usually a life turned into a poem is misrepresented.

Pain is filtered in a poem so that it becomes finally, in the end, pleasure.

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.

Do-gooders are easily overlooked. We're supposed to be soft, touchy-feely types, who wear Birkenstocks, compost everything, and write poetry by candlelight.

The founding father of Albanian literature is the nineteenth-century writer Naim Frasheri. Without having the greatness of Dante or Shakespeare, he is nonetheless the founder, the emblematic character. He wrote long epic poems, as well as lyrical poetry, to awaken the national consciousness of Albania.

Rap and spoken word have reawakened the country to poetry in itself. Texting and Twitter encourage creative uses of casual language, in ways I have celebrated widely. But we've fallen behind on savoring the formal layer of our language.

It is the timber of poetry that wears most surely, and there is no timber that has not strong roots among the clay and worms.

When you realize my best selling books are 'Owl Moon,' the 'How Do Dinosaur' books, and 'Devil's Arithmetic,' how can the public make sense of that! I have fans who think I only write picture books or only write SF and fantasy. I have fanatics of my poetry and are stunned to find out I write prose, too!