My first collection of poems was published by Bloodaxe Books, which was then a very new imprint.
I like poems that are little games.
I tended to write poems about both social and spiritual problems, and some problems one doesn't really want to solve, and so the problems themselves are solved. You certainly don't want to solve problems in poems that haven't been solved in the world.
In all the poems I've written I've not really engaged in politics, and when I've found myself moving in that direction I've always stopped myself.
But I can't and don't ever want to write bell-yanking confetti-tossing hat-throwing poems.
The idea is to take the most ordinary things and make them extraordinary, as Gerard Manley Hopkins does in his poems.
I've been writing poems since I was in the Navy - to Rosalynn. I found I could say things in poems that I never could in prose. Deeper, more personal things. I could write a poem about my mother that I could never tell my mother. Or feelings about being on a submarine that I would have been too embarrassed to share with fellow submariners.
I think of myself as a writer who photographs. Images, for me, can be considered poems, short stories or essays. And I've always thought the best place for my photographs was inside books of my own creation.
Spring has returned. The Earth is like a child that knows poems.
I would venture to guess that Anon, who wrote so many poems without signing them, was often a woman.
I try to apply colors like words that shape poems, like notes that shape music.
We have a lot of long narrative poems written in the 20th century, but they're not very well known, and they're not read by very many people.
Before I was ever a poet, my father was writing poems about me, so it was a turning of the tables when I became a poet and started answering, speaking back to his poems in ways that I had not before.
New poems no longer come to me with their prodigies of metaphor and assonance. Prose endures. I feel the circles grow smaller, and old age is a ceremony of losses, which is, on the whole, preferable to dying at forty-seven or fifty-two.
I love chapbooks. They're in some ways the ideal form in which to publish and read poems. You can read 19 poems in a way you can't sit down and read 60 to 70 pages of poems.
If I were to die thinking that I'd written three poems that people might read after me, I would feel that I hadn't lived in vain. Great poets might expect the whole body of their work, but most of us - well, I would settle for a handful.
There'll always be working people in my poems because I grew up with them, and I am a poet of memory.
The number of people writing poems is vast, and their reasons for doing so are many, that much can be surmised from the stacks of submissions.
What I'm fighting for now in my work... for an expression relevant to all manner of blacks, poems I could take into a tavern, into the street, into the halls of a housing project.
Certainly in my youth there was lots of singing, lots of storytelling, and whenever we went to a party, you had to do a party piece, like sing songs, recite poems, or tell stories. That sort of narrative musical culture was my upbringing.
The best books of our times have included the three mature volumes of Philip Larkin. They're very short books of poems, and very carefully arranged.
Indeed, I would venture to guess that Anon, who wrote so many poems without signing them, was often a woman.
And Robert Lowell, of course - in his poems, we're not located in his actual life. We're located more in the externals, in the journalistic facts of his life.
I work on words quite separately to music. They're both ongoing, and I don't ever feel like I'm working in a cycle in that respect, because it's every day anyway, no matter what I'm doing. Then I get to a point when I've collected together enough words that seem like they want to be songs rather than poems, or sometimes not.
I've had journals ever since I was really little. Sometimes I write poems and stuff, but for the most part I write down what happens to me during the day that I don't want to forget. So I have books filled with little things like that.
I admire Ginsberg as a poet, despite the fact that he seems not to know when he is being good and when he is bad. But he will last, or at least those poems will last.
We read Robert Browning's poetry. Here we needed no guidance from the professor: the poems themselves were enough.
I don't know why Sinclair Lewis fell in love with me. He didn't get even the slightest response from me. But his letters were lovely. And the poems he wrote me were lovely. I used some of them in my book.
Well, the great thing for me about poetry is that in good poems the dislocation of words, that is to say, the distance between what they say they're saying and what they are actually saying is at its greatest.
The interesting thing is that you don't often meet a poet who doesn't have a sense of humour, and some of them do keep it out of their poems because they're afraid of being seen as light versifiers.
Only truthful hands write true poems. I cannot see any basic difference between a handshake and a poem.
Today the U.S. is farther from being nourished by poetry than it was a hundred years ago, when books of poems were best-sellers.
We all write poems; it is simply that poets are the ones who write in words.
Everything is personal - the poems and the crime novels. I have never been involved in any murders, but there are strong autobiographical elements in each.
I'm all for poetry catching up with technology, and just as there are iTunes, I think we should have iPoems. I mean, people should be able to walk around with their earbuds in and listening to poems on their iPod.
My poems are always about my life in one way or another.
