Only one ship is seeking us, a black-Sailed unfamiliar, towing at her backA huge and birdless silence. In her wakeNo waters breed or break.
But superstition, like belief, must die...
One of the great criticisms of poets of the past is that they said one thing and did another.
It is fatal to decide, intellectually, what good poetry is because you are then in honour bound to try to write it, instead of the poems that only you can write.
I never think of poetry or the poetry scene, only separate poems written by individuals.
To write you must be warm, fed, loved and sober.
Why should I let the toad work Squat on my life? Can’t I use my wit as a pitchfork And drive the brute off? Six days of the week it soils With its sickening poison – Just for paying a few bills! That’s out of proportion.
Life and literature is a question of what one thrills to, and further than that no man shall ever go without putting his foot in a turd.
A writer can have only one language, if language is going to mean anything to him.
Clearly money has something to do with life...
Any memory for the most part depending on chance.
Here no elsewhere underwrites my existence.
In everyone there sleeps a sense of life lived according to love.
I think a young poet, or an old poet, for that matter, should try to produce something that pleases himself personally, not only when he’s written it but a couple of weeks later. Then he should see if it pleases anyone else, by sending it to the kind of magazine he likes reading.
I like spaghetti because you don’t have to take your eyes off the book to pick about among it, it’s all the same.
Poetry should begin with emotion in the poet, and end with the same emotion in the reader. The poem is simply the instrument of transferance.
Novels are about other people and poems are about yourself.
And the case of butterflies so rich it looks As if all summer settled there and died.
Uncontradicting solitude Supports me on its giant palm; And like a sea-anemone Or simple snail, there cautiously Unfolds, emerges, what I am.
I feel the only thing you can do about life is to preserve it, by art if you’re an artist, by children if you’re not.