Much that is beautiful must be discarded So that we may resemble a taller Impression of ourselves.
Reading is a pleasure, but to finish reading, to come to the blank space at the end, is also a pleasure.
The facts of history have been too well rehearsed.
I don’t look on poetry as closed works. I feel they’re going on all the time in my head and I occasionally snip off a length.
I write with experiences in mind, but I don’t write about them, I write out of them.
Imagine a painter crucified by his subject!
I don’t find any direct statements in life. My poetry imitates or reproduces the way knowledge or awareness come to me, which is by fits and starts and by indirection. I don’t think poetry arranged in neat patterns would reflect that situation. My poetry is disjunct, but then so is life.
It never seems to occur to anyone that each reader is different, and that even those who might be said to resemble each other will each bring an individual set of experiences and references to their reading, and interpret and misinterpret it according to these.
Poetry is mostly hunches.
In the increasingly convincing darkness The words become palpable, like a fruit That is too beautiful to eat.
And so we turn the page over. To think of starting. This is all there is.
There is the view that poetry should improve your life. I think people confuse it with the Salvation Army.
How many people came and stayed a certain time, Uttered light or dark speech that became part of you Like light behind windblown fog and sand Filtered and influenced by it, until no part Remains that is surely you.
Just when I thought there wasn’t room enough for another thought in my head, I had this great idea –.
Silly girls your heads full of boys.
Until, accustomed to disappointments, you can let yourself rule and be ruled by these strings or emanations that connect everything together, you haven’t fully exorcised the demon of doubt that sets you in motion like a rocking horse that cannot stop rocking.
The winter does what it can for its children.
I lost my ridiculous accent without acquiring another.
Each servant stamps the reader with a look.