As you get older, you find that often the wheat, disentangling itself from the chaff, comes out to meet you.

I tell poets that when a line just floats into your head, don't pay attention 'cause it probably has floated into somebody else's head.

Poetry is life distilled.

beware the easy griefs / that fool and fuel nothing.

There can be no whiter whiteness than this one: An insurance man's shirt on its morning run.

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!

I am an ordinary human being who is impelled to write poetry. ... I still do feel that a poet has a duty to words, and that words can do wonderful things, and it's too bad to just let them lie there without doing anything with and for them.