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Poetry fettered, fetters the human race. Nations are destroyed or flourish in proportion as their poetry, painting, and music are destroyed or flourish.

Anyone reading contemporary poetry - especially contemporary African-American poetry - will quickly see that race is an enduring subject. What some don't realize is just how diverse the handling of that subject is. It's as diverse as blackness.

It always has been and forever will be impossible for slavery or any kind or form of injustice to produce a great poet.

If we're gonna progress as a people we are going to realise that, as one of my favourite poets says, the other is a lie. There are no other people. Race is a social construct.

Every age has its own poetry; in every age the circumstances of history choose a nation, a race, a class to take up the torch by creating situations that can be expressed or transcended only through poetry.

There are certain pursuits which, if not wholly poetic and true, do at least suggest a nobler and finer relation to nature than we know. The keeping of bees, for instance.

Poetry is a beautiful way of spoiling prose, and the laborious art of exchanging plain sense for harmony.

A great many people seem to think writing poetry is worthwhile, even though it pays next to nothing and is not as widely read as it should be.

I think that the job of poetry, its political job, is to refresh the idea of justice, which is going dead in us all the time.

It's a sad fact about our culture that a poet can earn much more money writing or talking about his art than he can by practicing it.