The experimental poetry thing is not my thing. It's a programme of the avant-garde: basically a refusal of the kind of poetry I write.
The young people have MTV and rock and roll. Why would they go to read poetry? Poetry belongs to the Stone Age. It awakens in us perceptions that go back to those times.
Poetry may make us from time to time a little more aware of the deeper, unnamed feelings which form the substratum of our being, to which we rarely penetrate; for our lives are mostly a constant evasion of ourselves.
For awhile after you quit Keats all other poetry seems to be only whistling or humming.
I guess I wanted to leave America for awhile. It wasn't that I wanted to become an expatriate, or just never come back, I needed some breathing room. I'd already been translating French poetry, I'd been to Paris once before and liked it very much, and so I just went.
There are men who can write poetry, and there are men who can read balance sheets. The men who can read balance sheets cannot write.
When I was 18, I took a trip to Thailand with a friend. We stayed for a month. Bangkok was very raw for a teenager: there were no cellphones, no Internet, and the only music I had with me was this cassette by Liz Phair. I was writing a lot of poetry, and she embodied a talky style of songwriting that I found very accessible.
Poetry must have something in it that is barbaric, vast and wild.
Colloquial poetry is to the real art as the barber's wax dummy is to sculpture.
The poet may be used as a barometer, but let us not forget that he is also part of the weather.
Poetry isn't a profession, it's a way of life. It's an empty basket; you put your life into it and make something out of that.
Rap is poetry to music, like beatniks without beards and bongos.
Plot, rules, nor even poetry, are not half so great beauties in tragedy or comedy as a just imitation of nature, of character, of the passions and their operations in diversified situations.
And New York is the most beautiful city in the world? It is not far from it. No urban night is like the night there... Squares after squares of flame, set up and cut into the aether. Here is our poetry, for we have pulled down the stars to our will.
That's another pompous expression that is out of fashion, to say that poetry is a gift. It sounds pompous because you say, 'Who gave you the gift, and what is this gift?' And the gift is where I am; the gift is what I have come out of, the people around me who, I think, are beautiful people.
Poetry is a beautiful way of expressing feelings - happy, sad, angry, caring. It's also a way that we share with other people, to help them with those feelings.
Poetry is a beautiful way of spoiling prose, and the laborious art of exchanging plain sense for harmony.
Deals are my art form. Other people paint beautifully on canvas or write wonderful poetry. I like making deals, preferably big deals. That's how I get my kicks.
My exposure to Beckett and to late O'Neill was probably important right at the time I gave up poetry and the novel.
To me, art begets art. Painting feeds the eye just as poetry feeds the ear, which is to say that both feed the soul.
