An artist needs not so much an audience, as to feel a need to answer, a promise to respond... a good feeling about his art.

Deciding to remember, and what to remember, is how we decide who we are.

Sometimes the ideas that mean the most to you will feel true long before you can quite formulate them or justify them.

In the particular presence of memorable language we can find a reminder of our ability to know and retain knowledge itself: the brightness wherein all things come to see.

Poetry is the most bodily of the arts.

Poetry’s medium is the individual chest and throat and mouth of whoever undertakes to say the poem.

The medium of poetry is not words, the medium of poetry is not lines-it is the motion of air inside the human body, coming out through the chest and the voice box and through the mouth to shape sounds that have meaning. It's bodily.