Flipping the dial through available radio stations there will blare out to any listener an array of broadcasts 24/7 propagating Religious Right politics along with what they deem to be 'old-time gospel preaching.' This is especially true of what comes over the airwaves in Bible Belt southern states.

The message that I gave on the - on the steps today was that you need to stand for those things that are right and empower the individual. Believe in the power of one person. Don't believe that you can't do it. Everybody wants - everybody wants a shot. That we can all agree on. Beyond that it becomes politics. I'm not talking politics.

You don't go after poetry you take what comes. Maybe the gods do it through me but I certainly do a hell of a lot of the work.

The urge to write poetry is like having an itch. When the itch becomes annoying enough you scratch it.

I think that is where poetry reading becomes such an individual thing. I mean I have friend who like poets who just don't say anything to me at all I mean they seem to me rather ordinary and pedestrian.

Poetry comes alive to me through recitation.

Once every five hundred years or so a summary statement about poetry comes along that we can't imagine ourselves living without.

Most people can't tell now who wrote what. I like that blurring of identities within the band. because it becomes a unified thing that can't be related to other forms of historical poetry.

I don't like political poetry and I don't write it. If this question was pointing towards that I think it is missing the point of the American tradition which is always apolitical even when the poetry comes out of politically active writers.

He passes from lyric to epic poetry in order to speak about the world and the torment in the world through man rationally and emotionally. The poet then becomes a danger.

Bad quirky poetry might be better than some of the good stuff because it really comes from the heart.

So poetry becomes a means for useful dialogue between people who are not only unknown but mute to each other. It produces a dialogue among people that guards all of us against manipulation by our so-called leaders.

If you don't mark your successes the day your ship comes in could be just another day at the office and there's no poetry in that.

If you go into a bar in most places in America and even say the word poetry you'll probably get beaten up. But poetry is a really strong beautiful form to me and a lot of innovation in language comes from poetry.

I think it comes from really liking literary forms. Poetry is very beautiful but the space on the page can be as affecting as where the text is. Like when Miles Davis doesn't play it has a poignancy to it.

The romanticised life where all the great poetry and music and art of the world comes from is great but it requires a lot of self-indulgence.

The completely solitary self: that's where poetry comes from and it gets isolated by crisis and those crises are often very intimate also.

Slowly poetry becomes visual because it paints images but it is also musical: it unites two arts into one.

I learned to impersonate the kind of person that talks about poetry. It comes from teaching I think.

I see a resurgence of interest in poetry. I am less optimistic about the prospects for the arts when it comes to federal funding.

In fact in lyric poetry truthfulness becomes recognizable as a ring of truth within the medium itself.

The subject of Finnish poetry ought to have a special interest for the Japanese student if only for the reason that Finnish poetry comes more closely in many respects to Japanese poetry than any other form of Western poetry.

The poetry of a people comes from the deep recesses of the unconscious the irrational and the collective body of our ancestral memories.

When truth has no burning then it is philosophy when it gets burning from the heart it becomes poetry.