language

Language, identity, place, home: these are all of a piece - just different elements of belonging and not-belonging.

If you're writing about angry people, you use the language of anger. If you're writing about desperate people, you use the language of desperation.

The modern progressive movement believes that dissenting language is objectionable, which then removes the brakes between anger and violence.

Everyone is not able, or inclined, to write poetry in the narrower sense any more than everyone is qualified to take part in a walking race. But just as all of us can and do walk, so all of us can and do use language poetically.

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

Poetry, as odd as it is, and as hard to figure out as it is, many times, it's almost something that we're used to. It's kind of like a dream language that we had centuries ago, so that when we speak poetically or write a poem about what's going on, a real difficult issue that's facing our communities, people listen.

Part of what we love about poetry is the fact that it seems ancient, that it has an authority of ancient language and ancient form, and that it's timeless, that it reaches back.

Hebrew as a contemporary language, especially for poetry, is no longer the language of the Bible; but neither is it not the language of the Bible.

I think going from doing TV and straight plays to Shakespeare is weird enough because you have this heightened language, and you are telling a story through metric poetry. But I think music is that place beyond poetry.

The language of the Catholic Church - the liturgy, the prayer, the gospels - was in many ways my first poetry.

English poetry begins whenever we decide to say the modern English language begins, and it extends as far as we decide to say that the English language extends.

I try to show what it is about language and music that enthralls, because I think those are the two elements of poetry.

Poetry, almost by definition, calls attention to its language and form.

In every culture, in every language, there is expressive play, expressive word play; there's language use to different purposes that we would call poetry.

Some people think that English poetry begins with the Anglo-Saxons. I don't, because I can't accept that there is any continuity between the traditions of Anglo-Saxon poetry and those established in English poetry by the time of, say, Shakespeare. And anyway, Anglo-Saxon is a different language, which has to be learned.

I always read poetry before I write, to sensitize me to the rhythms and music of language.

'Milk and Honey' was written with me being honest to myself, kind of pulling at the things that I hear the most and saying that out loud, and you know, that thing that we hear the most is most universal, and so that rings true with all folks. The language used in the poetry is extremely, extremely accessible.

The Language Poets are writing only about language itself. The Ashbery poets are writing only about poetry itself. That seems to me a kind of dead end.