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" I come from Chicago, and the landscape of the Midwest has always meant a great deal to me. "

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" There are a lot of poems where I am questing for God. I don't think there is any finding of God. "

" 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. "

" I don't think you can read poetry while you're watching television very well. "

" The elegy does the work of mourning; it allows us to experience mortality. It turns loss into remembrance, and it delivers an inheritance. "

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

" 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. "

" 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. "

" My focus is on the reader and that the poet's job is not to inspire himself or herself. The poet's job is to inspire some future reader. "

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

" James Salter is a consummate storyteller. His manners are precise and elegant; he has a splendid New York accent; he runs his hands through his gray hair and laughs boyishly. "

" As soon as something happens to us in America, everyone begins talking about healing. But before you heal, you have to mourn. "

" The muse, the beloved, and duende are three ways of thinking of what is the source of poetry, and all three seem to me different names or different ways to think about something that is not entirely reasonable, not entirely subject to the will, not entirely rational. "

" I didn't read poetry seriously until college, when I really began to devour it in a very intense way. I also discovered that a poet is a maker. Before that, I thought a poet was someone who wrote about his own experiences. "

" You are always trying to make something that is more than the sum of its parts. "

" Poetry is meant to inspire readers and listeners, to connect them more deeply to themselves even as it links them more fully to others. But many people feel put off by the terms of poetry, its odd vocabulary, its notorious difficulty. "

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

" Writing poetry is such an intense experience that it helps to start the process in a casual or wayward frame of mind. "

" There are still many tribal cultures where poetry and song, there is just one word for them. There are other cultures with literacy where poetry and song are distinguished. But poetry always remembers that it has its origins in music. "

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

Different People

" When I was young, I wrote everything, and I thought I would be an all around writer, that I would write everything. "

" 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. "

" Daydreaming is one of the key sources of poetry - a poem often starts as a daydream that finds its way into language - and walking seems to bring a different sort of alertness, an associative kind of thinking, a drifting state of mind. "

" The commitment to working at poetry is important because a poet is a maker, and a poem is a made thing. We have to honor our feelings by working to transform them into something meaningful and lasting. "

" Poetry itself hasn't been well served by poets who fled to the margins. "

" 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. "

" Life has to have the plenitude of art. "

" A person who's only suffering can't write a poem. There are choices to be made, and you need to be objective. "

" 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. "

" In every culture, in every language, there is expressive play, expressive word play; there's language use to different purposes that we would call poetry. "