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

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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. "

" 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. "

" 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. "

" I like the machinery of poems, especially when they have human warmth. "

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

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

" 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. "

" Life has to have the plenitude of art. "

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

" 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. "

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

" One of the things that distinguishes poetry from ordinary speech is that in a very few number of words, poetry captures some kind of deep feeling, and rhythm is the way to get there. Rhythm is the way the poetry carries itself. "

" 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. "

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

" 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. "

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

" 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. "

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

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

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

" The sense of flowing, which is so crucial to song, is also crucial to poetry. "

" 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. "

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

" I find great consolation in having a lot of poetry books around. I believe that writing poetry and reading it are deeply intertwined. I've always delighted in the company of the poets I've read. "

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

" 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. "

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

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