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For better or worse, poetry is my life.

Poetry heals the wounds inflicted by reason.

Poetry at its best can do you a lot of harm.

Poetry may make us from time to time a little more aware of the deeper, unnamed feelings which form the substratum of our being, to which we rarely penetrate; for our lives are mostly a constant evasion of ourselves.

I cannot speak for more than an hour exclusively about poetry. At that point, life itself takes over again.

Poetry's always dead, you know? You don't realize how good poetry is until 15 years later.

No poetry that I'm aware of, however bad or glorious, has ever left somebody a worse person than they were before they read it.

Probably all the attention to poetry results in some value, though the attention is more often directed to lesser than to greater values.

As a direct line to human feeling, empathic experience, genuine language and detail, poetry is everything that headline news is not. It takes us inside situations, helps us imagine life from more than one perspective, honors imagery and metaphor - those great tools of thought - and deepens our confidence in a meaningful world.

Poetry can tell us about what's going on in our lives - not only our personal but our social and political lives.