For whatever reason, people, including very well-educated people or people otherwise interested in reading, do not read poetry.

That's one of the great things about poetry one realises that one does one's little turn - that you're just part of the great crop, as it were.

The other side of it is that, despite all that, people reach out to poetry at the key moments in their lives.

We simply have not kept in touch with poetry.

I don't live for poetry. I live far more than anybody else does.

I thought we were gonna open up the world of poetry and music to all kinds of things, and yet, I can't really think of anyone who's done anything like it since.

I guess I wanted to leave America for awhile. It wasn't that I wanted to become an expatriate, or just never come back, I needed some breathing room. I'd already been translating French poetry, I'd been to Paris once before and liked it very much, and so I just went.

I was always interested in French poetry sort of as a sideline to my own work, I was translating contemporary French poets. That kind of spilled out into translation as a way to earn money, pay for food and put bread on the table.

There is the view that poetry should improve your life. I think people confuse it with the Salvation Army.

In politics, as in poetry, it is sometimes true that it is darkest before dawn.