Readers should not be loaded with more information and guidance than a lively mind needs – puzzlement can be accepted, but insulting clarity is fatal to a poem.
Others may be able to accept standards from another, but an artist is a person who decides.
I am not learning definitions as established in even the latest dictionaries. I am not a dictionary-maker. I am a person a dictionary-maker has to contend with. I am a living evidence in the development of language.
The ocean and I have many pebbles To find and wash off and roll into shape.
I’ll be Pavlov, you be the dog.
Keep a journal, and don’t assume that your work has to accomplish anything worthy: artists and peace-workers are in it for the long haul, and not to be judged by immediate results.
Some people are blinded by their experience. Soldiers know how important war is. Owners of slaves learn every day how inferior subject peoples are.
People wander about what you are pursuing. You have to explain about the thread.
A speech is something you say so as to distract attention from what you do not say.
I heard a bird congratulating itself all day for being a jay. Nobody cared. But it was glad all over again, and said so, again.
All still when summer is over stand shocks in the field, nothing left to whisper, not even good-bye, to the wind. After summer was over we knew winter would come: we knew silence would wait, tall, patient calm.
An owl sound wandered along the road with me. I didn’t hear it – I breathed it into my ears.
Can injustice one way be corrected without the interim reaction that tries to impose injustice the other way?
And the things you know before you hear them; these are you and the reason you are in the world.
You can treat experience as a set of surprises on which to exercise your quirky self.
It is as if the ordinary language we use every day has a hidden set of signals, a kind of secret code.
A writer is someone who has found a process that will bring about new things.
If you can say it, it begins to exist.
You can lie at a banquet but you have to be honest in the kitchen.
The root and the flower have to trust each other. If the root does not trust, the plant won’t blossom.
I don’t see writing as a communication of something already discovered, as “truths” already known. Rather, I see writing as a job of experiment. It’s like any discovery job; you don’t know what’s going to happen until you try it.