Only truthful hands write true poems. I cannot see any basic difference between a handshake and a poem.
They’ve healed me to pieces.
The poem is lonely. It is lonely and en route. Its author stays with it. Does this very fact not place the poem already here, at its inception, in the encounter, in the mystery of encounter?
Only one thing remained reachable, close and secure amid all losses: language. Yes, language. In spite of everything, it remained secure against loss.
There’s nothing in the world for which a poet will give up writing, not even he is a Jew and the language of his poems is German.
Death is a master from Germany.
Reality is not simply there, it does not simply exist: it must be sought out and won.
Poetry is a sort of homecoming.
Don’t sign your name between worlds, surmount the manifold of meanings, trust the tearstain, learn to live.
There was earth inside them, and they dug.
Illegibility of this world. All things twice over. The strong clocks justify the splitting hour, hoarsely. You, clamped into your deepest part, climb out of yourself for ever.
The language with which I make my poems has nothing to do with one spoken here, or anywhere.
I went with my very being toward language.
Each arrow you shoot off carries its own target into the decidedly secret tangle.
Spring: trees flying up to their birds.
How you die out in me: down to the last worn-out knot of breath you’re there, with a splinter of life.
He speaks truly who speaks the shade.
Black milk of daybreak we drink it at sundown.
The heart hid still in the dark, hard as the Philosophers Stone.
Tall poplars – human beings of this earth!
Read! Read all the time, the understanding will come by itself.