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Poetry is fascinating. As soon as it begins the poetry has changed the thing into something extra, and somehow prose can go over into poetry.

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.

I've always been a fan of poetry. I grew up with Lawrence Ferlinghetti and the Beat poets. I really followed that stuff for a while. I just love the way people threw words around like they were painting.

They say poets write mostly for themselves; if anyone else likes it, well and good, if not, it doesn't matter; certainly, not to me.

More modern poetry is written than read.

The music just tends to be a vehicle for that poetry.

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.

My feeling is that poetry will wither on the vine if you don't regularly come back to the simplest fundamentals of the poem: rhythm, rhyme, simple subjects - love, death, war.

Poets don't draw. They unravel their handwriting and then tie it up again, but differently.

I think poets are much more dramatic, more theatrical than fiction writers.