If I weren't doing the politics I wouldn't be doing my job.

I've rarely kept my distance from kind of - I don't know if we can call it politics but kind of civic engagement and that kind of thing except I tended to think 'Well do it yourself before you start telling other people what they should be doing.'

I don't think consensus-building politics is what I'm meant to be doing.

Any American who is prepared to run for president should automatically by definition be disqualified from ever doing so.

Perseverance is the hard work you do after you get tired of doing the hard work you already did.

Whereas with poetry no one has to show anybody really and you don't have to tell anyone you're doing it.

Meet some people who care about poetry the way you do. You'll have that readership. Keep going until you know you're doing work that's worthy. And then see what happens. That's my advice.

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've often entertained paranoid suspicions about my fridge and what it's been doing to my poetry when I'm not looking but I never even considered that my fan was thinking about me.

From reading a previous answer you know that I consider all those aspects to be part of American cultural myth and thus they figure into good American poetry whether the poet is aware of what he is doing or not.

The middle class is doing fine in fiction. But it's not what gets me going. I love the working class and everyone from it I've met and think they're incredibly witty inventive - there's a lot of poetry there.

In fact a lot of them I think are absolute baloney. Those Charles Olsens and people like that. At first I was interested in seeing what they were up to what they were doing why they were doing it. They never moved me in the way that one is moved by true poetry.

I'm not precisely saying that a really good board meeting at the MLA (Museums Libraries and Archives Coucil) makes me want to go and write poetry but there is a pleasure in doing that sort of thing well.

Poetry is at the centre of my life too emotionally speaking and intellectually speaking - it's just that I'm one of those people who enjoy doing other stuff as well.

I've always had a love for poetry and when I got signed to a record label I thought 'How odd that I'm doing a record before a book of poetry '

I was trained as an actress. But I wasn't a very convincing actress so I started doing punk poetry and then fell into doing stand-up.

I never thought I'd be doing poetry books. I never really studied poetry. But the first one I did was after my mother died and I realized that people sort of think and talk about her style and fashion but in fact what made her the person she was was really her love of reading and ideas.