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The poet is a liar who always speaks the truth.

If a poet does not tell the truth about time, his or her work will not survive it. Past or present, there is a human dimension to time, human voices within it, and human griefs ordained by it.

There has been a time on earth when poets had been young and dead and famous - and were men. But now the poet as the tragic child of grandeur and destiny had changed. The child of genius was a woman, now, and the man was gone.

Whatever poet, orator or sage may say of it, old age is still old age.

Even though I am the daughter of a poet, and my stepmother is also a poet, growing up, I didn't think I could understand poetry; I didn't think that it had any relevance to my life, the feelings that I endured on a day-to-day basis, until I was introduced to the right poem.

Everywhere I go I find that a poet has been there before me.

But I'm too old to be written about as a young poet.

I had written here and there about my mother in my poems. There are poems for her in my first and second books.

I was unnerved to learn in my twenties that the poems of Emily Dickinson that I had memorized as a girl were not the poems as she had written them.

There is something about a poet which leads us to believe that he died, in many cases, as long as 20 years before his birth.