If poets were realistic, they wouldn't be poets.

Poetry should be able to reach everybody, and it should be able to appeal to all levels of understanding.

There are so many things that poetry is about, one of which is memory.

The trouble with the performance poets is that they don't seem to have read anything. So there is not a real sense of the poetic tradition in their work.

The relation between a poet and audience is really insignificant. What matters is the poet is hearing something that he is broadcasting. And whether there is anybody with a receiver isn't the reason he does it. He hopes there is somebody receiving it.

The reason one writes poems is so that your poem will be remembered.

The problem, for me, with the writing programs is that they produce a terrible uniformity of product.

If I were brave enough to say so, I'd like to think that I had written some poems that people are not going to forget.

Poetry was invented as an mnemonic device to enable people to remember their prayers.

Poetry is composing for the breath.

People are talking about the Internet as though it is going to change the world. It's not going to change the world. It's not going to change the way we think, and it's not going to change the way we feel.

My friends never talk to me about my poetry because they're embarrassed that I write it or they're embarrassed by what I write about which are not such extraordinarily terrifying things, but they are the state of human existence.

It is very difficult for people to come in contact with their own emotions and their own sensibilities.

It is a way we reassess our past. We can do that in poetry in ways we can't do in prose.

In order to understand what they need to understand, in order to write what they write, they have to be free. And yet, they aren't ever free. They are not free because they are not free of the constrictions their art puts on them.