I like poems you can tack all over with a hammer and there are no hollow places.

Poetry comes to me out of thin air or out of my unconscious mind. It's sort of the way dreams come to us and the way that we get knowledge from them, through television, old movies, which I watch a lot of. Lines of dialogue suddenly seem to be part of a poem.

To the poet as a basement quilt, but perhaps To some reader a latticework of regrets.

Reading is a pleasure, but to finish reading, to come to the blank space at the end, is also a pleasure.

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

Until, accustomed to disappointments, you can let yourself rule and be ruled by these strings or emanations that connect everything together, you haven't fully exorcised the demon of doubt that sets you in motion like a rocking horse that cannot stop rocking.

Somewhere someone is traveling furiously toward you, At incredible speed, traveling day and night, Through blizzards and desert heat, across torrents, through narrow passes. But will he know where to find you, Recognize you when he sees you, Give you the thing he has for you?