Modern poetry, for me, began not in English at all but in Spanish, in the poems of Lorca.

Certain words now in our knowledge we will not use again, and we will never forget them. We need them. Like the back of the picture.

You grieve Not that heaven does not exist but That it exists without us

To succeed [,] consider what is as though it were past, deem yourself inevitable and take credit for it. If you no longer believe, enlarge the temple.

When a poem is really finished, you can't change anything. You can't move words around. You can't say, 'In other words, you mean.' No, that's not it. There are no other words in which you mean it. This is it.

Of course there is nothing the matter with the stars It is my emptiness among them While they drift farther away in the invisible morning

We are not born to survive. Only to live.