I'm not asking a poem to carry a lot of rocks in its pockets. Just being an ordinary observer and liver and feeler and letting the experience get through you onto the notebook with the pen, through the arm, out of the body, onto the page, without distortion.

One of the duties of a baseball fan is to engage in arguments with the man behind him.

This creature of the poem may assemble itself into a being with its own centrifugal force.

I have learned to get pleasure from speaking of pain

She'd crack A joke sharp as a tin lid Hot from the teeth of the can-opener, And cackle her crack-corn laugh.

Writing or making anything-a poem, a bird feeder, a chocolate cake-has self-respect in it. You're working. You're trying. You're not lying down on the ground, having given up.

Maybe in order to understand sex fully/one has to risk being destroyed by it.