When you're really caught up in writing a poem, it can be a form of prayer. I'm not very good at praying, but what I experience when I'm writing a poem is close to prayer. I feel it in different degrees and not with every poem. But in certain ways writing is a form of prayer.

Insofar as poetry has a social function it is to awaken sleepers by other means than shock.

I believe every space and comma is a living part of the poem and has its function, just as every muscle and pore of the body has its function. And the way the lines are broken is a functioning part essential to the life of the poem.

There's in my mind a... turbulent moon-ridden girl or old woman, or both, dressed in opals and rags, feathers and torn taffeta, who knows strange songs but she is not kind.

Let me walk through the fields of paper touching with my wand dry stems and stunted butterflies.

The fire in leaf and grass so green it seems each summer the last summer.

The poem has a social effect of some kind whether or not the poet wills it to have. It has a kenetic force, it sets in motion...elements in the reader that would otherwise remain stagnant.