When I became poet laureate, I was in a slightly uncomfortable position because I think a lot of poetry isn't worth reading.
I have never considered myself a poet. I have no interest in poetic artistry.
Poems that come swiftly are usually the ones that you keep.
Dan Gerber is one of our finest living poets.
One reason to write a poem is to flush from the deep thickets of the self some thought, feeling, comprehension, question, music, you didn't know was in you, or in the world.
The number of people writing poems is vast, and their reasons for doing so are many, that much can be surmised from the stacks of submissions.
Where I come from, we sing poetry.
I believe the best poetry of our times is growing too artistic; the study is too visible. If freedom and naturalness are lost out of poetry, everything worth having is lost.
I am a patriot, but I must say that English poetry is the richest in the world.
There's not a good poet I know who has not at the beck and call of his memory a vast quantity of poetry that composes his mental library.
I alone of English writers have consciously set myself to make music out of what I may call the sound of sense.
The art of poetry consists in taking the poem through draft after draft, without losing its inspirational magic: he removes everything irrelevant or distracting, and tightens up what is left. Lazy poets never carry their early drafts far enough: some even believe that virtue lies in the original doodle scrawled on the back of an envelope.
Rhyme, that enslaved queen, that supreme charm of our poetry, that creator of our meter.
Among the American contemporaries I read with most enjoyment are several North Carolinians. I think the best poetry being written these days is being written by Southerners.
I'm lyrically driven, I'm not musically driven.
I don't like poetry that doesn't give me a sense of ritual, but I don't like poetry that doesn't sound like people talking to each other. I try to do both at once.
My mum is a singer and harpist, and my dad writes fantastic poetry, so we've grown up around a lot of words and music.
Verse is not written, it is bled; Out of the poet's abstract head. Words drip the poem on the page; Out of his grief, delight and rage.
Writing poetry is the hard manual labor of the imagination.
A beautiful line of verse has twelve feet, and two wings.
As a writer given to the old formalities of rhyme and meter, I sometimes feel endangered these days.
Great poetry does not have to be technically intricate.
Maybe there are three or four really good poets in a generation.
As civilization advances, poetry almost necessarily declines.
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.
