A poem is a place where the conditions of beyondness and withinness are made palpable, where to imagine is to feel what it is to be. It allows us to have the life we are denied because we are too busy living. Even more paradoxically, poetry permits us to live in ourselves as if we were just out of reach of ourselves.

It hardly seems worthwhile to point out the shortsightedness of those practitioners who would have us believe that the form of the poem is merely its shape.

From the reader's view, a poem is more demanding than prose.

Once you start describing nothingness, you end up with somethingness.

It's very hard to write humor.

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

Poetry is, first and last, language - the rest is filler.