Poems not only demand patience, they demand a kind of surrender. You must give yourself up to them. This is the real food for a poet: other poems, not meat loaf.

Nothing is the destiny of everyone, it is our commonness made dumb.

But I tend to think of the expressive part of me as rather tedious - never curious or responsive, but blind and self-serving.

A life is not sufficiently elevated for poetry, unless, of course, the life has been made into an art.

Pain is filtered in a poem so that it becomes finally, in the end, pleasure.

For some of us, the less said about the way we do things the better.

We all have reasons for moving. I move to keep things whole.