Writing poetry is talking to oneself; yet it is a mode of talking to oneself in which the self disappears; and the product's something that, though it may not be for everybody, is about everybody.

Some poets are more deeply involved than others in the raw experience which lies behind the poem and for them the act of composition is an act of self exploration with the definite goal of enlightenment rather than the ideally depersonalized construction of a beautiful and autonomous object.

As a poet, I am as I am in every other sphere of life. I’m real and flesh and blood. I don’t write to impress people or use clever allusions or references. I did all that when I was still at university, and it was rubbish poetry. Now I write only because the poem needs to be written. And it has its own life and its own personality—with its whimsical little in-jokes and its musicality. And if someone else likes the poem, then it’s probably because, at the bottom of it all, we have a shared human experience.

to be a poet, requires a mythology of the self. The self described is the poet self, to which the daily self (and others) are often ruthlessly sacrificed. The poet self is the real self, the other one is the carrier; and when the poet self dies, the person dies.

Who says my poems are poems? My poems are not poems. When you know that my poems are not poems, Then we can speak of poetry.

One is that I’m the first reader, and so I’m always writing these poems to myself, and my self — my self as a reader — is someone who wants to be transformed in the process of reading poems. I don’t want to read a poem that I already know.

instead of poems about experiences I am getting poems that are experiences, that contribute to my knowledge and my emotional life even while they reflect and assimilate it. In my earlier poems I told you, as precisely and eloquently as I knew how, about something in the more recent poems something is happening, something has happened to me and, if I have been a good parent to the poem, something will happen to you who read it.

It is true that the poet does not directly address his neighbors; but he does address a great congress of persons who dwell at the back of his mind, a congress of all those who have taught him and whom he has admired; that constitute his ideal audience and his better self. To this congress the poet speaks not of peculiar and personal things, but of what in himself is most common, most anonymous, most fundamental, most true of all men. And he speaks not in private grunts and mutterings but in the public language of the dictionary, of literary tradition, and of the street. Writing poetry is talking to oneself; yet it is a mode of talking to oneself in which the self disappears; and the products something that, though it may not be for everybody, is about everybody.

From the age of twenty, my ego has been invested in poetry. For me, the prospect of expression through poetry transforms solitary silence and an empty page into sheer pleasure. I feel unafraid, knowing I can break all the rules, invent my own forms. No matter what persona I take on, my voice remains accessible and recognizable. There is no artifice, no pose, no sense that I have to transform myself into someone else. As a poet, I remain comfortably disrespectful. I experiment, take risks which sometimes work and sometimes don't. For years I have had no such courage in essay writing. It has seemed an iron-clad genre that I could neither escape nor fit into.

Poetry, like life, states that the very self of a thing is its relations, its having-to-do-with other things. Whatever is in the world, whatever person, has meaning because it or he has to do with the whole universe: immeasurable and crowded reality. The technique of poetry aims for the intensification of a thing through showing the likeness of what is in that thing to something else--to everything else, as different.

What is a poem but a hazardous attempt at self-understanding? It is the deepest part of autobiography.

Well, here I suppose is my life, or part of it, by which I would wish to be judged... poems which have been written from a sense of compulsion, a real need to explore and articulate experiences which have been important to me.

One is forced to remember how far from "self-expression" great poems are — what a strange compromise between the demands of the self, the world, and Poetry they actually represent.

I think a poet's focus is not quite what a prose writer's is, it's not entirely on the world outside. It's fixed on the area where the inside meets the outside, where the poet's sensibility meets the weather, meets the street, meets other people... that shadow land between self and reality.