in the air, there your root remains, there, in the air

We are told that when Hölderlin went 'mad,' he constantly repeated, 'Nothing is happening to me, nothing is happening to me.'

Death is a master from Germany.

The language with which I make my poems has nothing to do with one spoken here, or anywhere.

There's nothing in the world for which a poet will give up writing, not even he is a Jew and the language of his poems is German.

A poem, being an instance of language, hence essentially dialogue, may be a letter in a bottle thrown out to the sea with the-surely not always strong-hope that it may somehow wash up somewhere, perhaps on the shoreline of the heart. In this way, too, poems are en route: they are headed towards. Toward what? Toward something open, inhabitable, an approachable you, perhaps, an approachable reality. Such realities are, I think, at stake in a poem.

Black milk of daybreak we drink it at sundown.