Poetry is, first and last, language - the rest is filler.

Usually a life turned into a poem is misrepresented.

If every head of state and every government official spent an hour a day reading poetry we'd live in a much more humane and decent world.

But I tend to think of the expressive part of me as rather tedious - never curious or responsive, but blind and self-serving.

Ink runs from the corners of my mouth. There is no happiness like mine. I have been eating poetry.

Pain is filtered in a poem so that it becomes finally, in the end, pleasure.

Poetry is something that happens in universities, in creative writing programs or in English departments.