Insomnia is an all-night travel agency with posters advertising faraway places.

Poetry is an orphan of silence.

The stone is a mirror which works poorly. Nothing in it but dimness. Your dimness or its dimness, who's to say? In the hush your heart sounds like a black cricket.

Here in the United States, we speak with reverence of authentic experience. We write poems about our daddies taking us fishing and breaking our hearts by making us throw the little fish back into the river. We even tell the reader the kind of car we were driving, the year and the model, to give the impression that it’s all true. It’s because we think of ourselves as journalists of a kind. Like them, we’ll go anywhere for a story. Don’t believe a word of it. As any poet can tell you, one often sees better with eyes closed than with eyes wide open.

If the sky falls they shall have clouds for supper.

Poems are other people's snapshots in which we see our own lives.

Only poetry can measure the distance between ourselves and the Other.