Poetry contains love and holds it in high esteem, even though love always humiliates it by using it merely as a soothing after-shave lotion.

Life's essential length is only a few pages long, as succinct as a line of verse and as brief as the title of a poem.

Poetry contains love and holds it in high esteem, even though love always humiliates it by using it merely as a soothing after-shave lotion.

What I try to do is to keep emotion on a tight leash; otherwise, it can never be transubstantiated into poetry.

Love grows by not giving to us. And if our passion for poetry lives on and persists, it is because poetry offers us only its bits of lint.

Poetry relishes ripe fruit - but ripe is one thing and overripe quite another. That's something poetry doesn't like, so it couldn't care less if I were to fall overripe to the ground.

I don't aspire, but I would be very happy if one of my poems suddenly offered someone a shady rest stop, a breather in our interminable march under the murderous, scorching heat of the superfluous.