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.

The rudiment of verse may, possibly, be found in the spondee.

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

As a child, what captivated me was reading the poems myself and realizing that there was a world without material substance which was nevertheless as alive as any other.

Lets tell young people the best books are yet to written; the best painting, the best government the best of everything is yet to be done by them.

Everyone is so different. I sometimes wish I wrote in a different way. You know, that feeling of: So-and-so writes slowly, if only I wrote slowly.

Maturity is the ability to think, speak and act your feelings within the bounds of dignity. The measure of your maturity is how spiritual you become during the midst of your frustrations.

Pride is a tricky, glorious, double-edged feeling.

Clarity, clarity, surely clarity is the Most beautiful thing in the world, A limited, limiting clarity I have not and never did have any Motive of poetry But to achieve clarity.

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 cried on my 18th birthday. I thought 17 was such a nice age. You’re young enough to get away with things, but you’re old enough, too.

I certainly have the feeling that I’m the same person even though I’ve changed a great deal.

Many poets write books. They’ll tell you: Well, I’ve got my next book, but there are two poems I need to write, one about x, one about y. This is a wonder to me.

The repossession by women of our bodies will bring far more essential change to human society than the seizing of the means of production by workers.

I was reared in the conservative atmosphere of a Methodist parsonage.

To identify the enemy is to free the mind.

I’ve been spending this last month trying to find four outfits to wear to the different premieres of The Two Towers. It’s hard work.

It’s a well known thing that ordinary perceptions can have a strange aspect when one is travelling.

To me, the mind seems to be spread out in the whole body – the senses are part of the brain. I guess they’re not where the thinking is done.

When you get over the anxiety, you discover you should have been mad a long time ago.

Stupidity is a talent for misconception.