Such tenderness, those afternoons and evenings, saying blackberry, blackberry, blackberry.
All the new thinking is about loss. In this it resembles all the old thinking
Poetry is a man arguing with himself; rhetoric is a man arguing with others.
The poem that comes closest to saying what I think is the one in Human Wishes called "Rusia en 1931." This poem is about [Osip] Mandelstam, who was a great poet and an anti-Stalinist, and [Cesar] Vallejo, who was a great poet and a Stalinist.
A word is elegy to what it signifies.
Someone in Ireland asked me how many Republican poets there were in the U.S., and I thought maybe two. Maybe there are 10,000 poets, and maybe there are two Republicans among them.