Books are meat and medicine and flame and flight and flower steel, stitch, cloud and clout, and drumbeats on the air.

I shall create! If not a note, a hole./If not an overture, a desecration.

She was afraid to suggest to him that to most people, nothing "happens." That most people merely live from day to day until they die. That, after he had been dead a year, doubtless fewer than five people would think of him oftener than once a year. That there might even come a year when no one on earth would think of him at all.

What shall I give my children? who are poor, / Who are adjudged the leastwise of the land...

Truth-tellers are not always palatable. There is a preference for candy bars.

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

When I start writing a poem, I don't think about models or about what anybody else in the world has done.