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"I'm passing on a tradition of which I am part. There's a long line of poets who went before me, and I'm another one, and I'm hoping to pass that on to other younger, or newer, poets than myself."
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"One, I have a wonderful publisher, Black Sparrow Press; as long as they exist, they will keep me in print. And they claim they sell very respectable numbers of my books, so I guess, and it's true, every place I go, my books are in libraries and on bookshelves."
Books

"So, I've never been politically correct, even before that term was available to us, and I have really identified with other people who don't want to be read as just a black poet, or just a woman poet, or just someone who represents a cause, an anti-Vietnam war poet."
War

"Because, in fact, women, feminists, do read my poetry, and they read it often with the power of their political interpretation. I don't care; that's what poetry is supposed to do."
Poetry

"High and low culture come together in all Post Modern art, and American poetry is not excluded from this."
Poetry

"Other people have noticed more of an evolution than I have and so I'll try to tell you where I'm coming from and also relate it to what I think other people perceive."
People

"American poetry, like American painting, is always personal with an emphasis on the individuality of the poet."
Poetry

"Still, language is resilient, and poetry when it is pressured simply goes underground."
Poetry

"I do not read newspapers. I do not watch television. I am not interested in current events, although I will occasionally discuss them if other people want to discuss them."
People

"Sometimes the archaism of the language when it's spoken is why we are all in love with the Irish today."
Love

"I definitely wish to distinguish American poetry from British or other English language poetry."
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"Immature poets imitate; mature poets steal."
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"Poets wish to profit or to please."
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"Frost is the most sophisticated of poets."
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"Pound's crazy. All poets are. They have to be. You don't put a poet like Pound in the loony bin."
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"The bicycle, the bicycle surely, should always be the vehicle of novelists and poets."
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"Poets write the words you have heard before but in a new sequence."
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"Travelers are like poets. They are mostly an angry race."
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"Maybe there are three or four really good poets in a generation."
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"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."
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"The poets have been mysteriously silent on the subject of cheese."
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