Distinctly American poetry is usually written in the context of one's geographic landscape, sometimes out of one's cultural myths, and often with reference to gender and race or ethnic origins.
From reading a previous answer, you know that I consider all those aspects to be part of American cultural myth and thus they figure into good American poetry, whether the poet is aware of what he is doing or not.
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.
I have always wanted what I have now come to call the voice of personal narrative. That has always been the appealing voice in poetry. It started for me lyrically in Shakespeare's sonnets.
I think I'm a very good reader of poetry, but obviously, like everybody, I have a set of criteria for reading poems, and I'm not shy about presenting them, so if people ask for my critical response to a poem, I tell them what works and why, and what doesn't work and why.
I think that great poetry is the most interesting and complex use of the poet's language at that point in history, and so it's even more exciting when you read a poet like Yeats, almost 100 years old now, and you think that perhaps no one can really top that.
My parents were willing to let me follow my nose, do what I wanted to do, and they supported my interest by buying the books that I wanted for birthdays and Christmas, almost always poetry books.
Every afternoon, I shut the door of my bedroom to write: Poetry was secret, dangerous, wicked and delicious.
In bohemian circles, we were very aware that poetry was missing from popular culture.
I didn't know until later, but my uncle was quite a famous bohemian in Glasgow, and he played guitar. My father was a kind of a poetic bohemian, and he read me poetry.
'Sunshine Superman' was a pioneering work that for the first time presented a fusion of Celtic, jazz, folk, rock, and Indian music as well as poetry.
Publishing a volume of verse is like dropping a rose petal down the Grand Canyon and waiting for the echo.
Poetry is what Milton saw when he went blind.
Writing a book of poetry is like dropping a rose petal down the Grand Canyon and waiting for the echo.
The olive branch has been consecrated to peace, palm branches to victory, the laurel to conquest and poetry, the myrtle to love and pleasure, the cypress to mourning, and the willow to despondency.
A poem can have an impact, but you can't expect an audience to understand all the nuances.
My father had wanted to name me for Dylan Thomas. He had seen him speak on one of those drunken poetry tours he did.
I didn't know how to weigh ideas about poetry. Nothing in the life I lived as a student - and later as wife and mother at the suburban edge of Dublin - suggested I had the wherewithal to do so. But I did have a unit of measurement. It was the measure of my own life.
Poetry begins where language starts: in the shadows and accidents of one person's life.
I began to write in an enclosed, self-confident literary culture. The poet's life stood in a burnished light in the Ireland of that time. Poets were still poor, had little sponsored work, and could not depend on a sympathetic reaction to their poetry. But the idea of the poet was honored.
With me poetry has not been a purpose, but a passion.
None but a poet can write a tragedy. For tragedy is nothing less than pain transmuted into exaltation by the alchemy of poetry.
Poetry is the deification of reality.
One of the things that distinguishes poetry from ordinary speech is that in a very few number of words, poetry captures some kind of deep feeling, and rhythm is the way to get there. Rhythm is the way the poetry carries itself.
I started writing poetry as a teenager in suburban Chicago out of emotional desperation.
Poetry is a vocation. It is not a career but a calling.
Daydreaming is one of the key sources of poetry - a poem often starts as a daydream that finds its way into language - and walking seems to bring a different sort of alertness, an associative kind of thinking, a drifting state of mind.
There is something about poetry beyond prose logic, there is mystery in it, not to be explained but admired.
Deals are my art form. Other people paint beautifully on canvas or write wonderful poetry. I like making deals, preferably big deals. That's how I get my kicks.
Stylized acting and direction is to realistic acting and direction as poetry is to prose.
For me, poetry is always a search for order.
For thousands of years, poetry has been picturing love as a mysterious and tragic power. But when anyone says the same thing in plain prose, and adds that life would be colourless and poor without the great passions, then this is called immorality!
If I read a book and it makes my whole body so cold no fire can ever warm me, I know that is poetry.
If I feel physically as if the top of my head were taken off, I know that is poetry.
There is no Frigate like a book to take us lands away nor any coursers like a page of prancing Poetry.
I don't think I've ever read poetry, ever.
I don't think I've ever read poetry, ever. I'm not really book-smart.
I guess the thing that I'm most proud of is that I kept on writing poetry. I understand that poetry is sort of the source of everything I do. It's the source of my creativity.
The musician is perhaps the most modest of animals, but he is also the proudest. It is he who invented the sublime art of ruining poetry.
For my part, if I consider poetry as an object, I maintain that it is born of the necessity of adding a vocal sound (speech) to the hammering of the first tribal music.
However, poetry does not live solely in books or in school anthologies.
I do not go in search of poetry. I wait for poetry to visit me.
Narrative art, the novel, from Murasaki to Proust, has produced great works of poetry.
Poetry is the art which is technically within the grasp of everyone: a piece of paper and a pencil and one is ready.
Slowly poetry becomes visual because it paints images, but it is also musical: it unites two arts into one.
There is also poetry written to be shouted in a square in front of an enthusiastic crowd. This occurs especially in countries where authoritarian regimes are in power.
There is poetry even in prose, in all the great prose which is not merely utilitarian or didactic: there exist poets who write in prose or at least in more or less apparent prose; millions of poets write verses which have no connection with poetry.
This proves that great lyric poetry can die, be reborn, die again, but will always remain one of the most outstanding creations of the human soul.
True poetry is similar to certain pictures whose owner is unknown and which only a few initiated people know.
Music begins to atrophy when it departs too far from the dance... poetry begins to atrophy when it gets too far from music.