Poetry is a mystic, sensuous mathematics of fire, smoke-stacks, waffles, pansies, people, and purple sunsets.

Give me hunger, pain and want, Shut me out with shame and failure From your doors of gold and fame, Give me your shabbiest, weariest hunger! But leave me a little love.

An expert is a damn fool a long way from home.

Poetry is a search for syllables to shoot at the barriers of the unknown and the unknowable.

Hog butcher for the world, Tool maker, stacker of wheat, Player with railroads and the nation's freight handler; Stormy, husky, brawling, City of big shoulders.

Poetry is the harnessing of the paradox of earth cradling life and then entombing it.

A tough will counts. So does desire.So does a rich soft wanting.Without rich wanting nothing arrives.