Quote

Poetry is a release of something previously unknown into the visible. You write to invite that, to make of yourself a gathering of the unexpected and, with luck, of the unexpectable.

Poetry is an orphan of silence. The words never quite equal the experience behind them.

Poetry is always slightly mysterious, and you wonder what is your relationship to it.

You will find poetry nowhere unless you bring some of it with you.

Poetry is the hardest thing that there is. It fascinates me, so I want to write more of it.

Poetry is the one place where people can speak their original human mind. It is the outlet for people to say in public what is known in private.

Poetry may make us from time to time a little more aware of the deeper, unnamed feelings which form the substratum of our being, to which we rarely penetrate; for our lives are mostly a constant evasion of ourselves.

I think writing a poem is like being a greyhound. Writing a novel is like being a mule. You go up one long row, then down another, and try not to look up too often to see how far you still have to go.

Poetry is really about your mental state or intellectual, and where you are, and you're trying to evoke that, explain it to yourself, whatever, you're trying to dig into it, analyse yourself.

Poems have a different music from ordinary language, and every poem has a different kind of music of necessity, and that's, in a way, the hardest thing about writing poetry is waiting for that music, and sometimes you never know if it's going to come.