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No good poem, however confessional it may be, is just a self-expression. Who on earth would claim that the pearl expresses the oyster?

Poetry must have something in it that is barbaric, vast and wild.

Words today are like the shells and rope of seaweed which a child brings home glistening from the beach and which in an hour have lost their luster.

A poem begins as a lump in the throat, a sense of wrong, a homesickness, a lovesickness.

My poems always begin with a metaphor, but my way into the metaphor may be a word, an image, even a sound. And I rarely know the nature of the metaphor when I begin to write, but there is an attentiveness that a writer develops, a sudden alertness that is much like the feel of a fish brushing against a hook.

It seems to me that readers sometimes make the genesis of a poem more mysterious than it is (by that I perhaps mean, think of it as something outside their own experience).

It hardly seems worthwhile to point out the shortsightedness of those practitioners who would have us believe that the form of the poem is merely its shape.

All art is autobiographical. The pearl is the oyster's autobiography.

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

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