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Poetry is a vocation. It is not a career but a calling.

To be a poet is a condition rather than a profession.

To be a poet is a condition, not a profession.

I don't think that I ever believed that poetry would be a career. I have always thought of poems as something more private than professional... I would never introduce myself as a poet. I will always have some other thing that I am.

As things are, and as fundamentally they must always be, poetry is not a career, but a mug's game. No honest poet can ever feel quite sure of the permanent value of what he has written: He may have wasted his time and messed up his life for nothing.

To be a poet, it's a challenge to do it in poverty, to do it in wealth. To do it in the academy, to do it in a relationship where you're happy. Everything changes the game. To do it in the awkward state of love, despair, dying. You just have to work it.

A poet is a professional maker of verbal objects.

On a practical level, poetry isn't something anybody has really made a great living at. I might sell some books and, once in a while, someone might pay to hear me read.

The commitment to working at poetry is important because a poet is a maker, and a poem is a made thing. We have to honor our feelings by working to transform them into something meaningful and lasting.

Poetry is a release of something previously unknown into the visible. You write to invite that, to make of yourself a gathering of the unexpected and, with luck, of the unexpectable.