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.

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 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.

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.

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.

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.

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

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

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

Frost is the most sophisticated of poets.

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

I like poems that are complex.

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.

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.

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

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

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

Poetry is composing for the breath.

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