Emily Dickinson calls previous poets her kinsmen of the shelf. You can always be consoled by your kinsmen of the shelf and you can participate in poe….

A poem is a hand, a hook, a prayer. It is a soul in action..

Often you've read another poem that you think is so beautiful that you'd like to make something like that. And so you try to make a sonnet that works….

But, the best times I have found, in my life, are late at night or early in the morning and I think it's because you're outside the social realm..

I think there are different kinds of poetry for different stages of life and there's the wild, exuberance of youth, there's the painful agony of midl….

I put down these memorandums of my affections in honor of tenderness, in honor of all of those who have been conscripted into the brotherhood of loss..

Cafeteria-style education, combined with the unwillingness of our schools to place demands on students, has resulted in a steady diminishment of comm….

In Náhuatl, the language of the Aztec world, one key word for poet was 'tlamatine,' meaning 'the one who knows,' or 'he who knows something.' Poets w….

I need to live like that crooked tree--... that knelt down in the hardest winds but could not be blasted away..

One of the deep fundamentals of poetry is the recurrence of sounds, syllables, words, phrases, lines, and stanzas. Repetition can be one of the most ….

You're alone with yourself and your own feelings and that gives you deeper access to what you need to get in touch with to write poetry..

And every year there is a brief, startling moment When we pause in the middle of a long walk home and Suddenly feel something invisible and weightl….

The spiritual desire for poetry can be overwhelming, so much do I need it to experience and name my own perilous depths and vast spaces, my own well-….

Poetry never loses its appeal. Sometimes its audience wanes and sometimes it swells like a wave. But the essential mystery of being human is always g….

Reading poetry is an adventure in renewal, a creative act, a perpetual beginning, a rebirth of wonder..

And when you are entering into poetry, whatever stage you're at, you are participating in something with a very long and noble tradition..

Poetry connects us to what is deepest in ourselves. It gives us access to our own feelings, which are often shadowy, and engages us in the art of mak….

It does demand a certain space in order to read it and I think that space is somewhat threatened by the lack of attention that people have and the am….

Works of art imitate and provoke other works of art, the process is the source of art itself..

Read poems to yourself in the middle of the night. Turn on a single lamp and read them while you're alone in an otherwise dark room or while someone ….

Language is an impure medium. Speech is public property and words are the soiled products, not of nature, but of society, which circulates and uses t….