If a line of poetry strays into my memory my skin bristles so that the razor ceases to act.

I want to write a book of poetry as well as children's stories.

I do not see how a man can work on the frontiers of physics and write poetry at the same time. They are in opposition.

Written poetry is different. Best thing is to see it in performance first then read it. Performance is more provocative.

Most people ignore most poetry because most poetry ignores most people.

But it is the province of religion of philosophy of pure poetry only to go beyond life beyond time into eternity.

Poetry teaches us music metaphor condensation and specificity.

I believe that the short story is as different a form from the novel as poetry is and the best stories seem to me to be perhaps closer in spirit to poetry than to novels.

I was influenced by surrealist poetry and painting as were thousands of other people and it seems to me to have become a part of the way I write but it's not.

I wonder if I ever thought of an ideal reader... I guess when I was in my 20s and in New York and maybe even in my early 30s I would write for my wife Janice... mainly for my poet friends and my wife who was very smart about poetry.

I was excited by what my painter friends were doing and they seemed to be interested in our poetry too and that was a wonderful little fizzy sort of world.

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 read it and I didn't read it until I was in my late 20s.

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

Poetry especially traditional Iranian poetry is very good at looking at things from a number of different angles simultaneously.

I see no reason for calling my work poetry except that there is no other category in which to put it.

Poetry is all nouns and verbs.

So I suppose poetry language the shaping of it was and remains for me an effort to make sense out of essentially senseless situations.