I would like to be proud of having written some poems that will be remembered, but I will never know whether I will have any reason to be proud of that.

I like poems that are complex.

The problem, for me, with the writing programs is that they produce a terrible uniformity of product.

If I were brave enough to say so, I'd like to think that I had written some poems that people are not going to forget.

I just think that some version of the past in our culture is going to rise up and become dominant.

My friends never talk to me about my poetry because they're embarrassed that I write it or they're embarrassed by what I write about which are not such extraordinarily terrifying things, but they are the state of human existence.

And there are a lot more people reading poetry, but there are not so many people reading an individual poet.

For instance, it's a little better now than it was two or three years ago, but something like 70% of the poems I receive seem to be written in the present indicative.

The more poetry you have in the head, the more poetry you will understand because you will be getting to the roots of what it is that makes people write poetry at all.

In my youth, I found that I was quite often inspired and pushed forward by what I read.

There are so many things that poetry is about, one of which is memory.

Frost is the most sophisticated of poets.

But poetry is my life. Poetry is what matters to me.

Poetry should be able to reach everybody, and it should be able to appeal to all levels of understanding.

In order to understand what they need to understand, in order to write what they write, they have to be free. And yet, they aren't ever free. They are not free because they are not free of the constrictions their art puts on them.

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

People are talking about the Internet as though it is going to change the world. It's not going to change the world. It's not going to change the way we think, and it's not going to change the way we feel.

The relation between a poet and audience is really insignificant. What matters is the poet is hearing something that he is broadcasting. And whether there is anybody with a receiver isn't the reason he does it. He hopes there is somebody receiving it.

It is a way we reassess our past. We can do that in poetry in ways we can't do in prose.

The trouble with the performance poets is that they don't seem to have read anything. So there is not a real sense of the poetic tradition in their work.

It is very difficult for people to come in contact with their own emotions and their own sensibilities.

If poets were realistic, they wouldn't be poets.

I like poems that are little games.

Poetry is composing for the breath.

But there is some way in which poets believe that and this is dangerous, too believe that their calling gives them a certain freedom. A certain freedom to live in a free way.

Every so often I find some poems that are too good for the readers of The Atlantic because they are a little too involved with the nature of poetry, as such.

They need to learn poetry. They don't need to learn about poetry. They don't need to be told how to interpret poetry. They don't need to be told how to understand poetry. They need to learn it.

But for me, being an editor I've been an editor of all kinds of books being an editor of poetry has been the way in which I could give a crucial part of my time to what I love most.

The reason one writes poems is so that your poem will be remembered.

Dealing with poetry is a daunting task, simply because the reason one does it as an editor at all is because one is constantly coming to terms with one's own understanding of how to understand the world.

Poetry was invented as an mnemonic device to enable people to remember their prayers.

I would like to be proud of having written some poems that will be remembered, but I will never know whether I will have any reason to be proud of that.

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.

To me many short poems read and write like beginnings that simply whet my appetite; I want to get over that.

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.

If I were assigned poems I suppose I'd write more of them but it is entirely voluntary and for the most part ignored in the market sense of the word so the language to me is most intimate, most important, most sublime and most satisfying when it gets done.

I like poems that are complex.

'A collected poems' is either a gravestone or a testimonial to survival.

I was in Paris at an English-language bookstore. I picked up a volume of Dickinson's poetry. I came back to my hotel, read 2,000 of her poems and immediately began composing in my head. I wrote down the melodies even before I got to a piano.

We have a lot of long narrative poems written in the 20th century, but they're not very well known, and they're not read by very many people.

Besides the actual reading in class of many poems, I would suggest you do two things: first, while teaching everything you can and keeping free of it, teach that poetry is a mode of discourse that differs from logical exposition.

Poems seem to have a life of their own. They tell you when enough is enough.

The few bad poems which occasionally are created during abstinence are of no great interest.

My readers at that time were still men of letters; but there had to be other people waiting to read my poems.

I wrote those poems for myself, as a way of being a soldier here in this country. I didn't know the poems would travel. I didn't go to Lebanon until two years ago, but people told me that many Arabs had memorized these poems and translated them into Arabic.

I work very hard on all my poems, but most of the work consists of trying not to sound as if I had worked. I try to make them sound as natural as possible, but within a quite strict form, which to my ears has a lot to do with musical rhythm and sound.

I don't expect you'll hear me writing any poems to the greater glory of Ronald and Nancy Reagan.

If I were brave enough to say so, I'd like to think that I had written some poems that people are not going to forget.

I was writing notes, but not composing poems. The Hunter began to develop out of this fragmented process.