A really interesting and happy time was when I first went to Florence as a student and studied Italian. I was living in a pensione on an allowance of….

My sonnet asserts that the sonnet still lives. My epic, should such fortune befall me, asserts that the heroic narrative is not lost - that it is bor….

One does not become a guru by accident..

A poem with grandly conceived and executed stanzas, such as one of Keats's odes, should be like an enfilade of rooms in a palace: one proceeds, with ….

Babies are not brought by storks and poets are not produced by workshops..

My feeling is that poetry will wither on the vine if you don't regularly come back to the simplest fundamentals of the poem: rhythm, rhyme, simple su….

Lyric poetry is, of course, musical in origin. I do know that what happened to poetry in the twentieth century was that it began to be written for th….

Writing for the page is only one form of writing for the eye. Wherever solemn inscriptions are put up in public places, there is a sense that the sit….

Oh let us not be condemned for what we are. It is enough to account for what we do..

Saigon was an addicted city, and we were the drug: the corruption of children, the mutilation of young men, the prostitution of women, the humiliatio….

Windbags can be right. Aphorists can be wrong. It is a tough world..

In rap, as in most popular lyrics, a very low standard is set for rhyme; but this was not always the case with popular music..

The writing of a poem is like a child throwing stones into a mineshaft. You compose first, then you listen for the reverberation..

One problem we face comes from the lack of any agreed sense of how we should be working to train ourselves to write poetry..

Nobody really knows whether they are a poet. I knew I was interested from the age of 15..

A glance at the history of European poetry is enough to inform us that rhyme itself is not indispensable. Latin poetry in the classical age had no us….

At somewhere around 10 syllables, the English poetic line is at its most relaxed and manageable..

The composer does not want the self-sufficiency of a richly complex text: he or she wants to feel that the text is something in need of musical setti….

Considering the wealth of poetic drama that has come down to us from the Elizabethan and Jacobean periods, it is surprising that so little of any val….

What happened to poetry in the twentieth century was that it began to be written for the page..

"Love" is so short of perfect rhymes that convention allows half-rhymes like "move". The alternative is a plague of doves, or a kind of poem in which….