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.

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

Much that is beautiful must be discarded So that we may resemble a taller Impression of ourselves.

Once you've lived in France, you don't want to live anywhere else, including France.

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

I'm heading for a clean-named place like Wisconsin, and mad as a jack-o'-lantern, will get there without help and nosy proclivities.

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.