Don't sign your name between worlds, surmount the manifold of meanings, trust the tearstain, learn to live.

Poetry is a sort of homecoming.

German poetry is going in a very different direction from French poetry.... Its language has become more sober, more factual. It distrusts "beauty." It tries to be truthful.

rush of pine scent (once upon a time), the unlicensed conviction there ought to be another way of saying this.

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

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.

Read! Read all the time, the understanding will come by itself.