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

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

" Life has to have the plenitude of art. "

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

" 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. "

" Throughout his work, Philip Levine's most powerful commitment has been to the failed and lost, the marginal, the unloved, the unwanted. "

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

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

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

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

Different People

" 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. "

" 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. "

" The idea that a poem was a made thing stayed with me, and I decided then that I wanted to be an artist, not just a diarist. So I put myself through a kind of apprenticeship in writing poetry, and I understood even then that my practice as a poet was deeply related to my reading. "

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

" 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. "

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

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

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

" 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. "

" 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. "

" 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. "

" 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. "

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

" I've been fascinated over the years by the way refrains work. Think, say, of the refrains in Yeats' ballads. Ideally, each time the refrain comes back in a poem, it is both the same and different. It works by counterpoint and reiteration. It accrues meaning. "

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

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

" 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. "

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

" 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. "

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