Poetry is the language of intensity. Because we are going to die, an expression of intensity is justified.

There is an idealism associated with poetry I would not dispel but question. It doesn't change anything except within. It shifts your insides around. Poetry is not going to reach the numbers of people by which we commonly consider a large audience. It just isn't a stadium-filler. It could still galvanize people during a crisis, but let's just say there are two points at which poetry is indispensable to people - at the point of love and the point of death. I'll second that emotion.

Poetry is the language of intensity. Because we are going to die, an expression of intensity is justified.

Everyone in their car needs love.

Uniformity, in its motives, its goals, its far-ranging consequences, is the natural enemy of poetry, not to mention the enemy of trees, the soil, the exemplary life therein.

The artistic reward for refuting the received national tradition is liberation. The price is homelessness. Interior exile.

It is a function of poetry to locate those zones inside us that would be free, and declare them so.