Poetry isn’t a profession, it’s a way of life. It’s an empty basket; you put your life into it and make something out of that.

The subject matter of the stories on the surface… there seem to be a number of stories about travel.

I’m probably so out of it at my age that I don’t know what people think.

Wisdom is knowing when you can’t be wise.

The moment of change is the only poem.

In masks outrageous and austere, The years go by in single file; But none has merited my fear, And none has quite escaped my smile.

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

I have been working since I was 14, nonstop.

Maybe there are three or four really good poets in a generation.

The teaching is very rewarding, and very time-consuming, and very exhausting. But it’s wonderful. The community here at NYU is very precious to me.

These questions absorbed me at an age when I was supposed to be getting down the rudimentary facts of American history, which I carelessly neglected.

A strong argument for the religion of Christ is this — that offences against Charity are about the only ones which men on their death-beds can be made — not to understand — but to...

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...

I have a notebook with me all the time, and I begin scribbling a few words. When things are going well, the walk does not get anywhere; I finally just stop and write.

Housework is the only activity at which men are allowed to be consistently inept because they are thought to be so competent at everything else.

Because a poem is not written while running or while answering the phone. It’s written in whatever minutes one has. Sometimes you have half an hour.

Poems in a way are spells against death. They are milestones, to see where you were then from where you are now. To perpetuate your feelings, to establish them. If you have in any way...

It’s exhilarating to be alive in a time of awakening consciousness; it can also be confusing, disorienting, and painful.

The true genius shudders at incompleteness – and usually prefers silence to saying something which is not everything it should be.

I’m never bored.

Writers sometimes give up what is most strange and wonderful about their writing – soften their roughest edges – to accommodate themselves toward a group response.

I’m a writer who likes to be influenced.

If I wrote in a sonnet form, I would be distorting. Or if I had some great new idea for line breaks and I used it in a poem, but it’s really not right for...

Verse is not written, it is bled; Out of the poet’s abstract head. Words drip the poem on the page; Out of his grief, delight and rage.

A revolutionary poem will not tell you who or when to kill, what and when to burn, or even how to theorize. It reminds you… where and when and how you are living and might...

For we must be one thing or the other, an asset or a liability, the sinew in your wing to help you soar, or the chain to bind you to earth.

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 think it’s healthy for couples to be away from each other for short periods.

I love painting and music, of course. I don’t know nearly as much about them as I know about poetry. I’ve certainly been influenced by fiction. I was overwhelmed by War and Peace when I...

There are some fine books and essays about that. Lewis Hyde has written about alcoholism and poets and the role that society gives its writers – encouraging them to die.

Everybody has to write out of rage sometimes.

The ninety and nine are with dreams, content but the hope of the world made new, is the hundredth man who is grimly bent on making those dreams come true.

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

Almost anything is too much. I am trying in my poems to have the reader be the experiencer. I do not want to be there. It is not even a walk we take together.

There’s a difference between beauty and charm. A beautiful woman is one I notice. A charming woman is one who notices me.

Every poet I know – although there may be some I don’t know who lead very different lives, who maybe live in the country and don’t teach – tends to be just like the rest...

Poetry is a natural energy resource of our country.It has no energy crisis, possessing a potential that will last as long as the country. Its power is equal to that of any country in the...

The worker can unionize, go out on strike; mothers are divided from each other in homes, tied to their children by compassionate bonds; our wildcat strikes have most often taken the form of physical or...

I am above the weakness of seeking to establish a sequence of cause and effect, between the disaster and the atrocity.

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

Oh, my God, this amazing cool breeze is coming through my window and the sun is shining. I’m happy.

As for political poetry, as it’s usually defined, it seems there’s very little good political poetry.

It might be a bad thing, not to know what’s going on in the world. I can’t say I really approve of it.

Lesbian existence comprises both the breaking of a taboo and the rejection of a compulsory way of life. It is also a direct or indirect attack on the male right of access to women.

I have a rendezvous with life.

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

I’m not perfect at all.

It’s not that I was indifferent ot the horrors of war, because that’s what inspired the poem to a large extent, but I couldn’t write about them.

This creature of the poem may assemble itself into a being with its own centrifugal force.

Some very plausible stuff is being written by women in a way that most men are not doing.