Quotes About Influence

I seem to keep returning to my father in poems because his personality was so extreme, so driven. He did everything to excess.

But you'd have a job to find many of my poems which would seem to be very influenced by a particular person.

I've been interested in LeRoi Jones/Amiri Baraka's work for quite a while. My first introduction to LeRoi Jones was when my mother used to read me the 'Dead Lecturer' poems when I was a kid.

Everybody that read one of my poems went off and wrote poetry. They said that about the Velvets, didn't they? They didn't sell many records, but everybody that saw them formed a band.

I am a guest of the French language. My poems in French are born of my interaction with the French language, which is not the same as that of a French poet.

Sport in itself has this power. If you are a poet or a singer, people gravitate. I may not be in the same category, but I will make a comparison with Bob Marley. So it isn't just cricket where social commentary plays a huge part.

When Robert Frost was alive, I was known as the other new England poet, which is to be barely known at all.

I want young children to savor and enjoy Tagore like I did since I was a child. He was too great a poet of India to be kept limited to Bengal. Everybody should read and celebrate him.

As fire kindled by fire, so is the poet's mind kindled by contact with a brother poet.

And in a way, that's been a help to me, because I take great passions for a particular poet - sometimes it lasts for many years, sometimes only for a while. This happens to everybody.

Are you really going to see Lewis? One of the few people it's worth getting excited over, I think. I know he is a good poet. I daresay he never heard of me, but I wish you would tell him that his work is the joy of my life.

My dad wanted to name me after Rainier Maria Rilke, the poet.

My mother was an actress and a director, as well. And my father was a playwright and poet.

I come from a short fiction background, and my mom is a poet, so I've always read poetry; I've always had a lot of different influences both linguistically and musically.

I was writing poems when I was young, you know, because my father was a poet, so it was absolutely normal to follow my father.

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.

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

I grew up writing. It was very natural in my household. My father was a poet, and his mother had been a novelist back in Hungary. I don't think I really thought about it being my career until high school, which is still pretty early, but it was a while there of just assuming this was something everyone did all day long.

I love Roald Dahl, Sharon Olds, Nizar Qabbani, who is a poet, and Junot Diaz.

Every contemporary poet is a door to another poet.

Edgar Allan Poe, I think he's a brilliant poet. I was actually given a copy of his work when I was, like, 8 years old that was my grandfather's, and I still carry it around with me.

I'm a huge fan of Toni Morrison. I just think she's so incredible. And also Nayyirah Waheed, who's a poet.

I think of the Tamil poet Subrahmanya Bharati every day, and he is an inspiration in my musical creations.

Being Poet Laureate made me realize I was capable of a larger voice. There is a more public utterance I can make as a poet.