We all have our muses. My grandmother and my mother are the people I write for. I'll never have to worry about who buys my work, or who likes it, and who doesn't. The people who I want to be proud of me already are.
To write poems, I think it's important to do research, and research mostly is going to come from books, so all of your reading is potentially helpful to your poetry.
Photographers direct the eye toward a particular object. We who write, one hopes, are directing the heart and the soul.
You must be unintimidated by your own thoughts because if you write with someone looking over you shoulder, you'll never write.
Writing is a conversation with reading; a dialogue with thinking. All conversations with older people contain repetition. Some of the ideas mean a lot to me, just interesting, so I both embrace and attack the ideas because I found them, well, delightful.
The poet can only write the poems; it takes the reader to complete the meaning.
I want to be clear about this. If you wrote from experience, you'd get maybe one book, maybe three poems. Writers write from empathy.
We write because we believe the human spirit cannot be tamed and should not be trained.