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" I believe in rooting poems in actual places, even if you move into some other extraordinary realm. "

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" I grew up in a middle-class house without books, without art. No one around me wrote poetry or even read it. "

" The idea of how to read a poem is based on the idea that poetry needs you as a reader. That the experience of poetry, the meaning in poetry, is a kind of circuit that takes place between a poet, a poem and a reader, and that meaning doesn't exist or inhere in poems alone. "

" The idea of a poem as a message in a bottle means that it's sent out towards some future reader, and the reader who opens that bottle becomes the addressee of the literary text. "

" The sole literary presence from my childhood was my grandfather, a Jewish immigrant from Latvia, who eccentrically copied poems into the backs of his books. After he died, when I was 8 years old, my grandmother gave his books away, and his poems were lost. "

" When I taught at the University of Houston in the Creative Writing program, we required the poets to take workshops in fiction writing, and we required the fiction writers to take workshops in poetry. "

" I find great consolation in having a lot of poetry books around. I believe that writing poetry and reading it are deeply intertwined. I've always delighted in the company of the poets I've read. "

" Poetry takes place in time. It is a durational. Things take place in sequence. "

" The Portuguese and Galician term 'saudade' suggests a profoundly bittersweet nostalgia. "

" One of the things that happens to everyone who is grief-stricken, who has lost someone, is there comes a time when everyone else just wants you to get over it, but of course you don't get over it. You get stronger; you try and live on; you endure; you change; but you don't get over it. You carry it with you. "

" Poetry takes courage because you have to face things and you try to articulate how you feel. "

" Each book should be an entity unto itself, with its own structure, character, life, name. "

" The very good thing about MFA programs is their democratizing. They bring a lot of different people to the table. "

Different People

" I started writing poetry as a teenager in suburban Chicago out of emotional desperation. "

" The terms of poetry - some simple, some complicated, some ancient, some new - should bring us closer to what we're hearing, enlarging our experience of it, enabling us to describe what we're reading, to feel and think with greater precision. "

" There have always been great defenses of poetry, and I've tried to write mine, and I think all of my work and criticism is a defense of poetry to try and keep something alive in poetry. "

" I'm a poet, and I spent my life in poetry. "

" I love the leisurely amplitude, the spaciousness, of taking a walk, of heading somewhere, anywhere, on foot. I love the sheer adventure of it: setting out and taking off. "

" Poetry is a vocation. It is not a career but a calling. "

" I found a comfort in trying to solve some poetic problems because there were human ones I just couldn't solve. "

" I don't think poetry will die, but I think that poetry does demand a certain kind of attention to language. 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 amount of time that they give to things. "

" As far as I'm concerned, freedom is the most important thing to creativity. You should feel free to write in whatever way, whatever language, feels comfortable to you. "

" As long as there's been poetry, there have been lamentations. "

" I think ancient cultures incorporated death into the experience of life in a more natural way than we have done. In our obsessive focus on youth, on celebrity, our denial of death makes it harder for people who are grieving to find a place for that grief. "

" Anyone who has lost a child will tell you that they don't recover their sense of endless possibility. Some people hide that well. But after a certain age, almost everyone is carrying something like that around, I suppose. "

" Our culture has become increasingly intolerant of that acute sorrow, that intense mental anguish and deep remorse which may be defined as grief. We want to medicate such sorrow away. "

" My cultural experiences were as important to my formation as many of the other things that happened to me. "

" A novel takes place over time. It's a historical narrative, and it needs to have a series of peaks and valleys and the move through. You can't just start at the highest pitch and stay there, but you can in a lyric poem. "

" I'm so happy to be an advocate for poetry. "

" Rhythm is sound in motion. It is related to the pulse, the heartbeat, the way we breathe. It rises and falls. It takes us into ourselves; it takes us out of ourselves. "

" I still feel that I'm capable of being as emotionally present as when I was young. "