You have your identity when you find out, not what you can keep your mind ON, but what you can't keep your mind OFF.

Poetry leads us to the unstructured sources of our beings, to the unknown, and returns us to our rational, structured selves refreshed.

Only silence perfects silence.

Where but in the very asshole of comedown is redemption: as where but brought low, where but in the grief of failure, loss, error do we discern the savage afflictions that turn us around: where but in the arrangements love crawls us through

Definition, rationality, and structure are ways of seeing, but they become prisons when they blank out other ways of seeing.

Once every five hundred years or so, a summary statement about poetry comes along that we can't imagine ourselves living without

With the first step, the number of shapes the walk might take is infinite, but then the walk begins to define itself as it goes along, though freedom remains total with each step: any tempting side road can be turned into an impulse, or any wild patch of woods can be explored. The pattern of the walk is to come true, is to be recognized, discovered.