Take the time to write. You can do your life's work in half an hour a day.

The professionalization of poetry, or the balkanization, has come out of the fact that when you apply to most creative writing programs, you have to choose your genre.

Poetry had in the hands of various people become a place for inconvenient knowledge insofar as it was a place for knowledge at all. But it was a place where you could talk about other kinds of experience than the official version.

There's a good deal in Pound's and Eliot's poetry that stood up even though their politics were deplorable. Or Pound's very deplorable, Eliot's kind of deplorable.

Poetry is a man arguing with himself; rhetoric is a man arguing with others.

Our history doesn't look at our own violence, the violence in our own past, and we go out and repeat it someplace else.

The birds are silent in the woods. / Just wait: soon enough / You will be quiet too