There's never been a culture without poetry in the history of the world. In every culture, in every language there is expressive play, expressive word play, there's language use to different purposes that we would call poetry.

There's the brilliant audacity of youth that poets strike upon in their earliest work sometimes that they never can hit upon again.

And when you are entering into poetry, whatever stage you're at, you are participating in something with a very long and noble tradition.

I think one of the things that distinguished my work from the beginning when I was in college was my turning towards poetry from other countries.

A great model for this is the way that Dante calls on Virgil at the beginning of 'The Inferno,' 'The Divine Comedy,' to help guide him through the underworld.

I have tried to remember throughout that poetry is made by flesh-and-blood human beings. It is a bloody art. It lives on a human scale and thrives when it is passed from hand to hand.

She [Carol Parsinan] somehow read my poems and came back to me and convinced me that I could be a poet, that I had the passion and the enthusiasm and the creativity to become a poet, but that what I was writing was not poetry because I was just expressing my feelings and I wasn't try to make anything.