Poetry is like making a joke. If you get one word wrong at the end of a joke you've lost the whole thing.

What does that represent? There was never any question in plastic art in poetry in music of representing anything. It is a matter of making something beautiful moving or dramatic - this is by no means the same thing.

To a poet the mere making of a poem can seem to solve the problem of truth but only a problem of art is solved in poetry.

The poetry of heroism appeals irresistibly to those who don't go to a war and even more to those whom the war is making enormously wealthy. It's always so.

If you were going to choose a way of making your way in this world and a place to start from you might not choose poetry and you might not choose Huddersfield.

The whole thing about making films in an organic film on location is that it's not all about characters relationships and themes it's also about place and the poetry of place. It's about the spirit of what you find the accidents of what you stumble across.

Poets should ignore most criticism and get on with making poetry.

The same people who are murdered slowly in the mechanized slaughterhouses of work are also arguing singing drinking dancing making love holding the streets picking up weapons and inventing a new poetry.

I was always making up rhymes. But I never thought that poetry would become my life.

I credit poetry for making this space-walk possible.

A lot of people think 'I'll give acting or poetry or filmmaking a try. And if it doesn't work out I'll go get a law degree do something else that's more practical.' For me I went the reverse way. I lived the back-up plan.

Poetry is not an expression of the party line. It's that time of night lying in bed thinking what you really think making the private world public that's what the poet does.

Poetry is plucking at the heartstrings and making music with them.

The poem is a little myth of man's capacity of making life meaningful. And in the end the poem is not a thing we see-it is rather a light by which we may see-and what we see is life.

I sometimes talk about the making of a poem within the poem.

I have this pet thing about how global communications are moving so fast now throwing information at you making everything available to you and yet I feel it's leaving us more and more isolated.

We all know the stories about the Human Rights Act... about the illegal immigrant who cannot be deported because and I am not making this up he had a pet cat.