Abortions will not let you forget. You remember the children you got that you did not get.

Writing is a delicious agony.

I am a writer perhaps because I am not a talker. It has always been hard for me to say exactly what I mean in speech But if I have written a clumsiness, I may erase it.

There are no magics or elves / Or timely godmothers to guide us. We are lost, must / Wizard a track through our own screaming weed.

Poetry is life distilled.

We don't ask a flower any special reason for its existence. We just look at it and are able to accept it as being something different from ourselves.

The forties and fifties were years of high poet-incense; the language-flowers were thickly sweet. Those flowers whined and begged white folks to pick them, to find them lovable. Then the '60s: Independent fire!