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No one here likes a wet dog.

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The poem is not, as someone put it, deflective of entry. But the real question is, 'What happens to the reader once he or she gets inside the poem?' T...more

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Poetry can do a lot of things to people. I mean it can improve your imagination. It can take you to new places. It can give you this incredible form o...more

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One of the disadvantages of poetry over popular music is that if you write a pop song, it naturally gets into people's heads as they listen in the car...more

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If you look a word up in the dictionary and twenty minutes later you're still wandering around in the dictionary, you probably have the most basic equ...more

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We love, you know, children love the ingredients of poetry. And then they go into this tunnel that we call adolescence, and when they come out of it, ...more

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The life of Edward Estlin Cummings began with a childhood in Cambridge, Mass., that he described as happy, but he struggled in both his artistic and r...more

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You know the parlor trick.wrap your arms around your own bodyand from the back it looks likesomeone is embracing youher hands grasping your shirther f...more

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It is time to float on the waters of the night. Time to wrap my arms around this book and press it to my chest, life preserver in a sea of unremarkabl...more

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This is what I think aboutwhen I shovel compostinto a wheelbarrow,and when I fill the long flower boxes,then press into rowsthe limp roots of red impa...more

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I love to move like a mouse inside this puzzle for the body, balancing the wish to be lost with the need to be found.

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Is there a better method of departure by night than this quiet bon voyage with an open book, the sole companion who has come to see you off, to wave y...more

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The History TeacherTrying to protect his students' innocencehe told them the Ice Age was really justthe Chilly Age, a period of a million yearswhen ev...more

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I see all of us reading ourselves away from ourselves, straining in circles of light to find more light until the line of words becomes a trail of cr...more

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But some nights, I must tell you,I go down there after everyone has fallen asleep.I swim back and forth in the echoing blackness.I sing a love song as...more