Pastoral Resources

There's one of my new poems actually - is a good example of where my poetry has ended up. My earlier river poetry was more like a cross between Shelley and Dylan Thomas.

If I wasn't writing poems I'd be washing my hands all the time.

Besides the actual reading in class of many poems, I would suggest you do two things: first, while teaching everything you can and keeping free of it, teach that poetry is a mode of discourse that differs from logical exposition.

Each poem in becoming generates the laws by which it is generated: extensions of the laws to other poems never completely take.

The ancient Greek oral poets all had this anxiety about the deficiencies of their memories and always began poems by praying to the Muse to help them remember.

I didn't think about whether I was writing poems. I was thinking. And the more I was thinking, the more there was I didn't understand.

I was very committed to the process of composing, working at poems, putting things together and taking them apart like some kind of experimental filmmaker.

I like poems you can tack all over with a hammer and there are no hollow places.

All I wanted to do was write - at the time, poems, and prose, too. I guess my ambition was simply to make money however I could to keep myself going in some modest way, and I didn't need much, I was unmarried at the time, no children.

Sometimes poetry is inspired by the conversation entered into by reading other poems.

To me many short poems read and write like beginnings that simply whet my appetite; I want to get over that.

I sometimes like to tinker with poems that have failed, ones that I have sent aside. Even years afterward, I will revisit them if there is something about them that I cannot give up on.

I would not say I chose to write long poems on a conscious level. The long poem has been a relative constant.

Most victims of my autobiographical verse are either far too polite, remarkably understanding unaware that I have written poems about them.

Why does one always ask a writer why they stopped? I am sure everyone finds in any drawer a few dear poems.

Criticism starts - it has to start - with a real passion for reading. It can come in adolescence, even in your twenties, but you must fall in love with poems.

What we call a poem is mostly what is not there on the page. The strength of any poem is the poems that it has managed to exclude.

What I'm fighting for now in my work... for an expression relevant to all manner of blacks, poems I could take into a tavern, into the street, into the halls of a housing project.

Today the U.S. is farther from being nourished by poetry than it was a hundred years ago, when books of poems were best-sellers.

My earliest poems sing of the absolute necessity of allowing love to invade and pervade one's life. That can make the miracle happen in reality. Try it.