I could hear music playing in the background of works by certain authors, like Poe and Shakespeare. And I discovered Nikki Giovanni when I was in eighth grade. Her writing has a musical energy with...

Poetry is truth in its Sunday clothes.

I have epiphanies all the time, because I'm always thinking. I'm a thinker. I'm always writing poetry, I'm always coming to conclusions.

In 'A Poetics of Optics,' Equi writes that 'all images bank on alchemy.' This idea captures her fundamental sense of poetry as turning common material into something rare and valuable.

I like to write, I like to reflect, and not just poetry, I like to write my thoughts down. I think it's good for people who are more introspective, and it helps me get a better understanding of...

The composition of a single melody is born out of a bit of text, perhaps the first line, but it can also be the entire strophe; it can even be the poem's overall form.

When it passes towards the east, the sun begins to have less effect upon it, and a thin line on the edge of its bright side emits its splendour towards the earth.

I believe the poet shouldn't be in the poem at all except as a lens or as ears.

Grey cloth coaxes the lime trees of friends shadowing berries dropped by the grateful earth.

My favorite poets may not be your bread and butter. I have more favorite poems than favorite poets.

Sometimes, I think the best kind of poem is one in which there is an acute balance between what is humorous and that which is very serious. That balance is very hard to strike. But it can be done.

A really good poem is full of music.

As poet laureate, I was asked to be a spokesman for literature.

You can feel greatness in the ring. You can get two guys that gel together and it's just like poetry or a work of art.

If I do a poetry reading I want people to walk out and say they feel better for having been there - not because you've done a comedy performance but because you're talking about your father dying or...

At each moment, a poem might grow into a totally different shape. It is not so much like working in a garden. It is more as if you remade the garden every day.

Idleness - a job that you have to go to, but not necessarily do anything - is the poet's friend.

With contemporary poetry having approximately as many fans outside the immediate field as there are devotees of undergoing knee surgery, any sentient, breathing reader who's genuinely interested in...

Our cat is like a kind dove shellfish, and thinks the world is hers. She finds a comfy spot and then we pet turtle sheep purrs.

I see no marks of Wordsworth's style of writing or style of thinking in my own work, yet Wordsworth is a constant presence when I write about human beings and their relations to the natural world.

If epic poetry is a definite species, the sagas do not fall within it.

I have a bit of a love affair with fairy tales and some of the ideas of Irish mythology, like Oscar Wilde and W.B. Yeats, who captured a lot of that very beautifully.

I love high summer as well, but nothing beats a perfect May morning.

A beautiful sunset that was mistaken for a dawn.

I am grateful for - though I can't keep up with - the flood of articles, theses, and textbooks that mean to share insight concerning the nature of poetry.

Bewitched, bothered and bewildered am I.

Poetry has the virtue of being able to say twice as much as prose in half the time, and the drawback, if you do not give it your full attention, of seeming to say half as much in twice the time.

There are no poetic ideas; only poetic utterances.

Music is closer to poetry than anything.

There is no piece of guitar music that has the formal beauty of a piano sonata by Mozart, or the richly worked out ideas and passion of a late Beethoven string quartet, or for that matter the...