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

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

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

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

" I had feelings that I didn't know what to do with, and I felt better when I started writing them. I thought of it as poetry. I did notice girls really liked it. Better than football. They liked the combination. "

" 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. "

" 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. "

" There's never been a culture without poetry in the history of the world. "

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

" 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 began to imitate what I was reading, and I started to become a poet, even though what I was writing were not good poems. "

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

" 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. "

" I'd say people do need some help with poetry because I think poetry just helps takes us to places that Americans aren't always accustomed to going. "

" You're trying to write about something that's sacred. You're trying to bring the seriousness of life and death to it, and you're trying to find a way to dramatize it, and you're trying to give language to it, which is inadequate. But it's important to try. "

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

" 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. "

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

" Poetry is a form of necessary speech... I have sought to restore the aura of sacred practice that accompanies true poetic creation, to honor both the rational and the irrational elements of poetry. "

" Life has to have the plenitude of art. "

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

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

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

" 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. "

" It's very important to me to be an American poet, a Jewish poet, a poet who came of age in the 1960s. "

" 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. "

" Someone who's awake in the middle of the night is a soul consciousness when everyone else is asleep, and that creates a feeling of solitude in poetry that I very much like. "

" 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. "

" 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. "

" It's absolutely crucial to maintain my life as a poet. "