If you know what you are going to write when you're writing a poem, it's going to be average.

Any serious attempt to try to do something worthwhile is ritualistic.

Peel your own image from the mirror. Sit. Feast on your life.

Who cares about a kid from the Midwest writing pentameter? It's stupid.

The personal vocabulary, the individual melody whose metre is one's biography, joins in that sound, with any luck, and the body moves like a walking, a waking island.

I try to forget what happiness was, and when that don't work, I study the stars.

For every poet it is always morning in the world; history a forgotten, insomniac night. The fate of poetry is to fall in love with the world in spite of history.