Quotes About Reflection

Poetry is indispensable - if I only knew what for.

A book is sent out into the world, and there is no way of fully anticipating the responses it will elicit. Consider the responses called forth by the Bible, Homer, Shakespeare - let alone contemporary poetry or a modern novel.

I've got a book of poetry by the bed, one of these big collections that goes back to the Greeks and Romans.

I cannot say I'm a poet. That's for someone when they take in consideration where they can bestow 'poet' on. I can't do it. But I would be disingenuous if I didn't say that my intention is poetry.

I love a little Richard Brautigan poetry.

Poetry is composing for the breath.

I love poetry - just to read it and be around it.

Poetry is what Milton saw when he went blind.

But poetry is my life. Poetry is what matters to me.

I guess I wanted to leave America for awhile. It wasn't that I wanted to become an expatriate, or just never come back, I needed some breathing room. I'd already been translating French poetry, I'd been to Paris once before and liked it very much, and so I just went.

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

I think that it's more likely that in my 60s and 70s I will be writing poetry rather than fiction.

Let me read you some of my poetry. My poetry just takes me to another level.

The Language Poets are writing only about language itself. The Ashbery poets are writing only about poetry itself. That seems to me a kind of dead end.

All poets are idlers, even if all idlers are not poets.

Poets take themselves very seriously.

Poets often are dealing with history and are thinking about the way history moves across us, and we move in it.

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

Memoir is a difficult literary form to pull off when dealing with discrete and poignant moments in a life, even harder when seeking to narrate over 80 years of existence.

You constantly have to take inventory, not get on someone else's agenda. You want to write something that's poignant and moves people.

At the point we finished 'Abbey Road,' the game was up. We all accepted that.

What's the point? My face, shall we say, looks lived in.

I played point guard in the past and I know myself.

I think that's the greatest gift one can have: point of view. You know? I've come to believe that if you have a bad memory of something, change it.