I am suggesting that the radical of poetry lies not in the resolution of doubts but in their proliferation

Poetry requires deliberate movement in its direction, a filament of faith in its persistence, receptivity to its fundamental worthwhileness. Within its unanesthetized heart there is quite a racket going on. Choices have to be made with respect to every mark. Not every mistake should be erased. Nor shall the unintelligible be left out. Order is there to be wrenched from the tangles of words. Results are impossible to measure. A clearing is drawn around the perimeter as if by a stick with a nail on the end.

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

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

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