A person who's only suffering can't write a poem. There are choices to be made, and you need to be objective.
As long as there's been poetry, there have been lamentations.
As soon as something happens to us in America, everyone begins talking about healing. But before you heal, you have to mourn.
Depression is a feeling without a cause. Mourning has a cause.
Each book should be an entity unto itself, with its own structure, character, life, name.
Fresh or changing conditions ferment fresh forms.
I aspire to a poetry of great formal integrity, deep passion and high intellect, and I have many models for how to do that.
I began to imitate what I was reading, and I started to become a poet, even though what I was writing were not good poems.
I believe in rooting poems in actual places, even if you move into some other extraordinary realm.
I come from Chicago, and the landscape of the Midwest has always meant a great deal to me.
I don't think you can read poetry while you're watching television very well.
I found a comfort in trying to solve some poetic problems because there were human ones I just couldn't solve.
I grew up in a middle-class house without books, without art. No one around me wrote poetry or even read it.
I like the machinery of poems, especially when they have human warmth.
I read a lot as a kid and in high school.
Life has to have the plenitude of art.
It's very important to me to be an American poet, a Jewish poet, a poet who came of age in the 1960s.
It's absolutely crucial to maintain my life as a poet.
I'm so happy to be an advocate for poetry.
I'm a poet, and I spent my life in poetry.
I still feel that I'm capable of being as emotionally present as when I was young.
I started writing poetry as a teenager in suburban Chicago out of emotional desperation.
