I don't think that someone who does not speak the original language can ever expect to produce a real translation.

I am a Christian because of that moment on the cross when Jesus, drinking the very dregs of human bitterness, cries out, My God, my God, why hast thou forsaken me? (I know, I know: he was quoting the Psalms, and who quotes a poem when being tortured? The words aren’t the point. The point is he felt human destitution to its absolute degree; the point is that God is with us, not beyond us, in suffering.)

Nature poets can't walk across the backyard without tripping over an epiphany.

Mandelstam was an artistic genius, the sort that any century produces only a handful of.

I honestly don’t know whether I am describing something essential about the way we know God or merely my own weakness of mind.

It's just that different emotions and perceptions demand different frequencies and intensities.

I've never been able to write poetry without having vast tracts of dead time. Poetry requires a certain kind of disciplined indolence that the world, including many prose writers, doesn't recognize as discipline. It is, though. It's the discipline to endure hours that you refuse to fill with anything but the possibility of poetry, though you may in fact not be able to write a word of it just then, and though it may be playing practical havoc with your life. It's the discipline of preparedness.