The last thing a young artist should do in poetry or any other field is think about whats in style, whats current, what are the trends. Think instead of what you like to read, what do you admire, what you like to listen to in music. What do you like to look at in architecture? Try to make a poem that has some of those qualities.

When I had no roof I made audacity my roof.

Poetry is the most bodily of the arts.

In jazz, as in poetry, there is always that play between what’s regular and what’s wild. That has always appealed to me.

There is much appeal for me in Eastern religion, the little I know of it. And something thorny in me finds American adaptations of Buddhism terribly self-indulgent, silly, gooey in the way the English call "wet."

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

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