The United States brags about its political system but the President says one thing during the election something else when he takes office something else at midterm and something else when he leaves.

In this world of sin and sorrow there is always something to be thankful for as for me I rejoice that I am not a Republican.

Women who are inclined to write poetry at all are inspired by being mad at something.

To feel most beautifully alive means to be reading something beautiful ready always to apprehend in the flow of language the sudden flash of poetry.

So much of my poetry begins with something that I can describe in visual terms so thinking about distance thinking about how life begins and what might be watching us.

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.

Short fiction is the medium I love the most because it requires that I bring everything I've learned about poetry - the concision the ability to say something as vividly as possible - but also the ability to create a narrative that though lacking a novel's length satisfies the reader.

I'd never really been content with just churning out these slim volumes every three or four years. I've always tried to think of poetry as an active ingredient in the language rather than just something that appears between the covers of thin books.

I do actually dabble in a bit of poetry! And I'm yet to pen a script but it is something that I've been telling myself I want to do.

That poetry survived in its formal agencies finally and that prose survived to get something said.

To know anything of a poet but his poetry is so far as the poetry is concerned to know something that may be entertaining even delightful but is certainly inessential.

Poetry is something that happens in universities in creative writing programs or in English departments.

Poetry is fascinating. As soon as it begins the poetry has changed the thing into something extra and somehow prose can go over into poetry.

Auden said poetry makes nothing happen. But I wonder if the opposite could be true. It could make something happen.

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.

However I learned something. I thought that if the young person the student has poetry in him or her to offer them help is like offering a propeller to a bird.

The fact that something is in a rhymed form or in blank verse will not make it good poetry.