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

The dead made this world. We didn't make it. They made the poetry and the songs and the customs.

My feeling is that poetry is also a healing process, and then when a person tries to write poetry with depth or beauty, he will find himself guided along paths which will heal him, and this is more important, actually, than any of the poetry he writes.

I saw Sophia Loren - the Italian woman with those wonderful cheekbones - in a movie the other day. She must have had 24 face-lifts, and she looks like an alien, as if she weren't from this world at all. Her Italian wrinkles would have been a thousand times more beautiful.

Those of us who make up poems have agreed not to say what the pain is.

There's a quality we could call vertical attention, which is an attention upward toward ancestors, spiritual states, angels, gods.

There are a lot of men who are healthier at age fifty then they have ever been before, because a lot of their fear is gone.