Poetry seems to sink into us the way prose doesn't. I can still quote verses I learned when I was very young, but I have trouble remembering one line of a novel I just finished reading.

After I'd produced about two dozen pen and ink drawings, one evening I decided that they needed poems to accompany them. I still have no idea where that notion came from, but it took me about two hours to produce verses for these creatures.

I keep a guitar around while writing and will improvise music. I do this for several reasons, such as that it's fun, and sometimes it helps me with the meter.

Poetry seems to sink into us the way prose doesn't. I can still quote verses I learned when I was very young, but I have trouble remembering one line of a novel I just finished reading.

I accept challenges, I have always done that in writing.

My reading is extremely eclectic. Lately I've been teaching myself computer graphics, so I'm reading a lot about that. I read books of trivia, of facts.

There's not too much difference between writing a picture book and writing a collection of a hundred poems or so, except that the bigger books take a lot longer to do.

We all need ways to express ourselves, and poetry is one of mine.

Frankly, writing poetry for children is plain old fun, and I consider myself blessed to have such a delightful career.

Then I decided to draw from and on my own imagination, and everything came out perfect.

Writing gives me the opportunity to explore ideas, play with language, solve problems, use my imagination, and draw on my own childhood.

When I began writing, I didn't read any other children's poets... I didn't want to be influenced until I'd found my own voice. Now I read them all.

I've been influenced by poets as diverse as Dylan Thomas, Lewis Carroll, and Edgar Allan Poe.

I invented animals and birds - I had about two dozen. After working on them for six months, I sat down and just for fun wrote two dozen poems to accompany the drawings. It was for no one to every see, but a friend sent me in to an editor.

I look for poetry in English because it's the only language I read.

I would go to sketch groups and draw. I really enjoyed the subject matter, but I wasn't good at it.

Children seem naturally drawn to poetry - it's some combination of the rhyme, rhythm, and the words themselves.

I'm usually working on eight or 10 things at once.

I'm working now on a collection of Shakespearean sonnets, about 100 of them, that I may publish if anyone's interested. My take on life is a little different from the bard's.

I write the poems first, with only a few exceptions for odd reasons, where I'm given the illustration first.

Otherwise I don't read much adult poetry at all, because I'm not smart enough and mostly I don't get it.

My wife used to tell me one of my best qualities was that my feet don't smell, but I remember my brother's did when we were kids.

I'm mostly influenced by life, what's around me, and my own childhood.

I'm never bored.

I always knew would be some sort of artist, but didn't know what.

In masks and gown we haunt the street and knock on doors for trick or treat tonight we are the king and queen for oh tonight its Halloween

Still, language is resilient, and poetry when it is pressured simply goes underground.

I grew up in this town, my poetry was born between the hill and the river, it took its voice from the rain, and like the timber, it steeped itself in the forests.

Art: If the object of poetry is, to make men, then poetry is the heir of prophecy.

I want to promote poetry to the point where you got all the baldhead kids running around doing poetry, getting the music out of the way and having only words, the spoken word, and then see what happens.

But in the finished art of the song the use of words has no connection with the use of words in poetry.

The gross heathenism of civilization has generally destroyed nature, and poetry, and all that is spiritual.

Poetry is a matter of life, not just a matter of language.

There is probably nothing wrong with art for art's sake if we take the phrase seriously, and not take it to mean the kind of poetry written in England forty years ago.

Because people are very interested in my poetry, in what I say.

The poetry from the eighteenth century was prose; the prose from the seventeenth century was poetry.

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.

I was reading the poems of Rochester. Rochester made himself out to be bisexual, but I think that was only to shock. Most of his poetry is sexual, even pornographic.

For me concrete poetry was a particular way of using language which came out of a particular feeling, and I don't have control over whether this feeling is in me or not.

Poetry is fascinating. As soon as it begins the poetry has changed the thing into something extra, and somehow prose can go over into poetry.

Poetry is an art, the easiest to dabble in, but the hardest to reach true excellence.

Write verse, not poetry. The public wants verse. If you have a talent for poetry, then don't by any means mother it, but try your hand at verse.

Narrative art, the novel, from Murasaki to Proust, has produced great works of poetry.

To know anything of a poet but his poetry is, so far as the poetry is concerned, to know something that may be entertaining, even delightful, but is certainly inessential.

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

I don't know a better preparation for life than a love of poetry and a good digestion.

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.

There is one type of ideal woman very seldom described in poetry - the old maid, the woman whom sorrow or misfortune prevents from fulfilling her natural destiny.

Any long work in which poetry is persistent, be it epic or drama or narrative, is really a succession of separate poetic experiences governed into a related whole by an energy distinct from that which evoked them.