"In college, I took a poetry class with Jorie Graham, an amazing poet. She directed me to Hass, and his stuff moved me so much. His writing is very American, spare, clean. And manly. There’s a ruggedness to his poems. One in particular I’ve always loved is called ‘Dragonflies Mating.’ It combines a sense of abandonment in childhood with natural images. I don’t even know exactly what it means, but I think that’s what poetry does—it evokes all these feelings without our really understanding why or how it’s done."

"From the first lines of Celan’s “Todesfuge”: Black milk of daybreak we drink it at sundown/ we drink it at noon in the morning we drink it at night/ we drink and we drink it Celan’s poems are terrifying and beautiful, many of them reflect his experience of the Holocaust. His parents died in a concentration camp, he was imprisoned in a labor camp. Language is Celan’s tool of combat and survival, and of the evocation of memory. I have always preferred poetry and prose to fiction. Poetry condenses."

"Alice Oswald's extraordinary poetry sequence “Memorial,” takes the deaths and similes of the “Iliad” as the core of a deeply moving evocation of war, loss, and the poet's struggle to find the words for what it's like to die."

"Talking of the modern poet in modern music and listening to Lou Reed as a part of The Velvet Underground, we are really listening to the WH Auden of the modern world. Once again, not existing in print poetry but in recorded noise"