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

Poetry is any page from a sketchbook of outlines of a doorknob with thumb-prints of dust, blood, dreams.

Poetry is a phantom script telling how rainbows are made and why they go away.

In democracy both a deep reverence and a sense of the comic are requisite.

And even now she beats her head against the bars in the same old way and wonders if there is a bigger place the railroads run to from Chicago where maybe there is romance and big things and real dreams that never go smash.

There is a music for lonely hearts nearly always. If the music dies down there is a silence. Almost the same as the movement of music. To know silence perfectly is to know music.

There are men and women so lonely they believe God, too, is lonely.