What you feel in Japanese poetry is always entirely longing.

The best poems take long journeys. I like poetry best that journeys--while remaining in the human scale--to the other world, which may be a place as easily overlooked as a bee's wing

I felt a longing to compose a radical or root poem that would speak to what has its back turned to me.

Every noon as the clock hands arrive at twelve, I want to tie the two arms together, And walk out of the bank carrying time in bags.

Male initiation does not move toward machoism; on the contrary, it moves toward achieving a cultivated heart before we die.

Tragedies are about the depths that call up to certain men and insist that they descend.

We spend our life until we’re twenty deciding what parts of ourself to put into the bag, and we spend the rest of our lives trying to get them out again.