I sometimes talk about the making of a poem within the poem.

Language is remarkable, except under the extreme constraints of mathematics and logic, it never can talk only about what it's supposed to talk about but is always spreading around.

The historian is terribly responsible to what he can discern are the facts of the case, but he's nothing if he doesn't make out a case.

The only way out is the way through, just as you cannot escape death except by dying. Being unable to write, you must examine in writing this being unable, which becomes for the present -henceforth?- the subject to which you are condemned.

I've never read a political poem that's accomplished anything. Poetry makes things happen, but rarely what the poet wants.

It may be said that poems are in one way like icebergs: only about a third of their bulk appears above the surface of the page.

We think about sex obsessively except during the act, when our minds tend to wander.