Constantly risking absurdity and death whenever he performs above the heads of his audience, the poet, like an acrobat, climbs on rhyme to a high wire of his own making.

I'm reading a book about Romaine Brooks, a wonderful painter from early in the last century.

I once started out to walk around the world but ended up in Brooklyn, that Bridge was too much for me.

Anyone who saw Nagasaki would suddenly realize that they'd been kept in the dark by the United States government as to what atomic bombs can do.

You can publish a poem you think is a very important poem, and you don't hear a word from anyone. [...] You can publish a book of poetry by dropping it off a cliff and waiting to hear an echo. Quite often, you'll never hear a thing. So doing that, using older work, puts it in a context, and that sort of forces the reader to realize what its importance is-if it has any. Everything needs a context. You're not going to recognize a poet unless you have a context.

We have seen the best minds of our generation destroyed by boredom at poetry readings.

Poetry is eternal graffiti written in the heart of everyone.