Poetry is God's work.
For now, poetry has the capacity - in its own ways and by its own means - to remind us of something we are forbidden to see.
The greatest poem is not that which is most skillfully constructed, but that in which there is the most poetry.
Poetry and code - and mathematics - make us read differently from other forms of writing. Written poetry makes the silent reader read three kinds of pattern at once; code moves the reader from a static to an active, interactive and looped domain; while algebraic topology allows us to read qualitative forms and their transformations.
My friends tell me that I am an intruder, that I don't really write when I attempt poetry. But those of my friends who write in prose say that I'm no writer when I attempt prose. So really I don't know what to do, I'm in a quandary.
When I was about twenty-one, I published a few poems. Maybe I wrote a couple of stories before, but I really began to write stories in my mid-thirties. My kids were still little, and they were in school and day care, and I had begun to think a lot about wanting to tell some stories and not being able to do it in poetry.
The spiritual desire for poetry can be overwhelming, so much do I need it to experience and name my own perilous depths and vast spaces, my own well-being.
Poetry is one of the most fugitive arts: it can be assigned to memory, taken and hidden in the mind, smuggled into smoky cabin back rooms, recited there and then conveyed only by speech to another person. It is therefore the most likely to survive colonization.
I don't write poetry for the New Yorker. My poems appear in the Nation, mostly.
Our best history is still poetry.
Modern poetry, for me, began not in English at all but in Spanish, in the poems of Lorca.
I was very interested in American poetry for many years. Much less now.
Pure mathematics is, in its way, the poetry of logical ideas.
I believe that every English poet should read the English classics, master the rules of grammar before he attempts to bend or break them, travel abroad, experience the horrors of sordid passion, and - if he is lucky enough - know the love of an honest woman.
Why speak of the use of poetry? Poetry is what uses us.
The poet uses the results of science and philosophy, and generalizes their widest deductions.
Poetry is not the thing said, but the way of saying it.
Get rid of words, and get rid of meaning, and still there is poetry.
Disobedience to conscience is voluntary; bad poetry, on the other hand, is usually not made on purpose.
I think we've come to a kind of splinter period in poetry. These tiny little bright fragments of observation - and not produced under sufficient pressure - some of it's very skillful, but I don't think there's anywhere a discernible major poet in the process of emerging; or if he is, I ain't seen him.