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

Almost none of the poetries I admire stick to their labels, native or adopted ones. Rather, they are vagrant in their identifications. Tramp poets, there you go, a new label for those with unstable allegiances.

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.

Poetry is a necessity of life.

Poetry takes you into the recesses of the language, the neglected corners, cracks and crannies and to the big sky of wonder. It opens the door to a critique without which you have rather boring analytical tools by comparison. To cultivate poetry means to stay with it. Not to abandon hope, but to abide.

Readers have to be sought out and won to the light of the page, poem by poem, one by one by one.

Poetry seems especially like nothing else so much as itself. Poetry is not like, it is the very lining of the inner life.