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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. "

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" Once your poems are completed, you send them into the world. You don't write for a coterie of other writers - you write for other human beings. "

" 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. "

" 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. "

" Fresh or changing conditions ferment fresh forms. "

" 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. "

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

" 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. "

" 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. "

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

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

" 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 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. "

" 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. "

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

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

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

" 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. "

" 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. "

" You're shadowed by your own dream, especially as you get older, of trying to create something that will last in poetry. And so, you're working on its behalf. "

" 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. "

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

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

" 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. "

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

" I read a lot as a kid and in high school. "

" Poems mesmerized me, and I felt better when I was writing them, or trying to - more in touch with something deep and dark within myself. "

" 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. "