Quotes about "Retirement & Later Life"

The idea that a poem was a made thing stayed with me, and I decided then that I wanted to be an artist, not just a diarist. So I put myself through a kind of apprenticeship in writing poetry, and I understood even then that my practice as a poet was deeply related to my reading. ”

I didn't read poetry seriously until college, when I really began to devour it in a very intense way. I also discovered that a poet is a maker. Before that, I thought a poet was someone who wrote about his own experiences. ”

The terms of poetry - some simple, some complicated, some ancient, some new - should bring us closer to what we're hearing, enlarging our experience of it, enabling us to describe what we're reading, to feel and think with greater precision. ”

It's absolutely crucial to maintain my life as a poet. ”

Each book should be an entity unto itself, with its own structure, character, life, name. ”

Life has to have the plenitude of art. ”

I'm a poet, and I spent my life in poetry. ”

Writing poetry is such an intense experience that it helps to start the process in a casual or wayward frame of mind. ”

I think ancient cultures incorporated death into the experience of life in a more natural way than we have done. In our obsessive focus on youth, on celebrity, our denial of death makes it harder for people who are grieving to find a place for that grief. ”

I thought cars were essential ingredients of life itself. ”