I listen to music a great deal. In a way, it's trying to express things that can't be expressed in words. That's something that interests me, too. Even though I use words to express myself, I am trying to, it seems to me, get beyond that.

I don't find any direct statements in life. My poetry imitates or reproduces the way knowledge or awareness come to me, which is by fits and starts and by indirection. I don't think poetry arranged in neat patterns would reflect that situation. My poetry is disjunct, but then so is life.

One listens to a piece of great music, say, and feels deeply moved by it, and wants to put this feeling into words, but it can't be put into words. That's what - the music has already supplied the meaning, and words will just be superfluous after that. But it's that kind of verbal meaning that can't be verbalized that I try to get at in poetry.

Part of the strength of Pollock and Rothko's art, in fact, is this doubt as to whether art may be there at all.

And so we turn the page over. To think of starting. This is all there is.

There is the view that poetry should improve your life. I think people confuse it with the Salvation Army.

I don't want to read what is going to slide down easily; there has to be some crunch, a certain amount of resilience.