I always thought that writing poetry was in itself a political act.

I think that in the process of writing, all kinds of unexpected things happen that shift the poet away from his plan and that these accidents are really what we mean when we talk about poetry.

Not until it starts to stink does the inevitable happen.

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

until only infinity remained of beauty

I feel that poetry is going on all the time inside, an underground stream.

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.