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You just go where poetry is, whether it's in your heart or your mind or in books or in places where there's live poetry or recordings.

If poetry and the arts do anything, they can fortify your inner life, your inwardness.

Poetry is the most intimate of all writing. I want to speak first from me to myself and then from me to you.

What I try to do is to go into a poem - and one writes them, of course, poem by poem - to go into each poem, first of all without having any sense whatsoever of where it's going to end up.

I want to be a poet and have a chance to explore that and let people know what's really on my mind.

Mostly, when I travel, I want to represent my own work well and let others know how I feel about poetry being an important part of life.

Poetry is the one place where people can speak their original human mind. It is the outlet for people to say in public what is known in private.

You will find poetry nowhere unless you bring some of it with you.

I have learned so much from working with other poets, travelling and reading with them, spending days discussing poems in progress. There is the sense that we are all, as writers, part of something which is more powerful than any of us.

Poets are always ahead of things in a certain way, their sense of language and their vision.