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" 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. "

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

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

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

" 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. "

" Poets have always celebrated grief as one of the deepest human emotions. "

" 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. "

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

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

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

" 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. "

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

" 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. "

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

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

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

" 'Liberty Brass' is a small machine that unfolds in a single unpunctuated wave, which is interrupted by the rotating sign, the refrain. Each part is meant to do its work in relentless progression. "

" The line is a way of framing poetry. All verse is measured by lines. The poetic line immediately announces its difference from everyday speech and prose. "

" 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. "

" I aspire to a poetry of great formal integrity, deep passion and high intellect, and I have many models for how to do that. "

" Depression is a feeling without a cause. Mourning has a cause. "

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

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

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

" When poetry separates from song, then the words have to carry all the rhythm themselves; they have to do all the work. They can't rely on the singing voice. "

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

" 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. "

" 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. "

" 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. "

" 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. "

" 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. "