If you need a certain vitality you can only supply it yourself, or there comes a point, anyway, when no one's actions but your own seem dramatically convincing and justifiable in the plot that the number of your days concocts.

The summer demands and takes away too much. /But night, the reserved, the reticent, gives more than it takes

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.

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

Poetry is mostly hunches.

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

I lost my ridiculous accent without acquiring another