Gertrude Stein said, "I write for myself and strangers." I would say I write for myself, strangers and the great dead.

And sometimes you look at the first poems by someone and you go, "They have freshness and a sense of wonder that is never recaptured again by that poet."

Read poems to yourself in the middle of the night. Turn on a single lamp and read them while you're alone in an otherwise dark room or while someone else sleeps next to you. Read them when you're wide awake in the early morning, fully alert. Say them over to yourself in a place where silence reigns and the din of the culture — the constant buzzing noise that surrounds us — has momentarily stopped. These poems have come from a great distance to find you.

I think one of the things that distinguished my work from the beginning when I was in college was my turning towards poetry from other countries.

I did not know the work of mourning Is a labor in the dark We carry inside ourselves

The idea of a poem as a message in a bottle means that it's sent out towards some future reader and the reader who opens that bottle becomes the addressee of the literary text.

I don't think you can read poetry while you're watching television very well.