America, how can I write a holy litany in your silly mood?

in my dreams you walk dripping from a sea journey on the highway across America in tears to the door of my cottage in the Western night

I am neither romantic nor a visionary, and that is my weakness and perhaps my power; at any rate it is one difference. In less romantic and visionary terms, I am a Jew, (with powers of introspection and eclecticism attendant, perhaps.) But I am alien to your natural grace, to the spirit which you would know as a participator in America.

I think it was when I ran into Kerouac and Burroughs - when I was 17 - that I realized I was talking through an empty skull... I wasn't thinking my own thoughts or saying my own thoughts.

Poetry is not an expression of the party line. It's that time of night, lying in bed, thinking what you really think, making the private world public, that's what the poet does.

Inside skull vast as outside skull

If you want to make order, put your own heart in order, and, having put one's heart in order, one can regulate the family order.