No one wants to read poetry. You have to make it impossible for them to put the poem down – impossible for them to stop reading it, word after word. You have to keep them from closing the book.
What would happen if one woman told the truth about her life? The world would split open.
I remember mother saying : Inventors are like poets, a trashy lot.
Flight is intolerable contradiction.
I am working out the vocabulary of my silence.
One writes in order to feel...
The process of writing a poem represents work done on the self of the poet, in order to make form.
Try to live as if there were a God.
I speak to you. You speak to me. Is that fragile?
The universe of poetry is the universe of emotional truth. Our material is in the way we feel and the way we remember.
We sit here, very different each from the other, until the passion arrives to give us our equality, to make us part of the play, to make the play part of us.
All the poems of our lives are not yet made.
I lived in the first century of world wars. Most mornings I would be more or less insane.
Slowly I would get to pen and paper, Make my poems for others unseen and unborn. In the day I would be reminded of those men and women, Brave, setting up signals across vast distances, considering a nameless way of living, of almost unimagined values.
Beware of those who talk about sacrifice.
Poetry is, above all, an approach to the truth of feeling.
There is also, in any history, the buried, the wasted, and the lost.
Hollywood works continually to keep its standard of contempt for the audience.
Punctuation is biological. It is the physical indication of the body-rhythms which the reader is to acknowledge...
Outrage and possibility are in all the poems we know...
The fear of poetry is the fear.