God has to remind us this isn't heaven by a long shot, so he increases the radios and lethal flies.

I am inhabited by a cry. Nightly it flaps out Looking, with its hooks, for something to love.

I think that in poetry personal experience is very important, but certainly it shouldn't be a kind of shut-box and mirror looking, narcissistic experience. I believe it should be relevant, and relevant to the larger things, the bigger things such as Hiroshima and Dachau and so on.

If I didn’t think, I’d be much happier.

I knew chemistry would be worse, because I'd seen a big card of the ninety-odd elements hung up in the chemistry lab, and all the perfectly good words like gold and silver and cobalt and aluminum were shortened to ugly abbreviations with different decimal numbers after them.

The silence depressed me. It wasn't the silence of silence. It was my own silence.

Perhaps you considered yourself an oracle, Mouthpiece of the dead, or of some god or other. Thirty years now I have labored To dredge the silt from your throat. I am none the wiser.