The future is always beginning now.
Usually a life turned into a poem is misrepresented.
Pain is filtered in a poem so that it becomes finally, in the end, pleasure.
Sometimes he did not know if he slept or just thought about sleep.
It came to my house.It sat on my shoulders.Your shadow is yours. I told it so. I said it was yours.I have carried it with me too long. I give it back.
When we walk in the sunour shadows are like barges of silence.
A life is not sufficiently elevated for poetry, unless, of course, the life has been made into an art.
I would say that American poetry has always been a poetry of personal testimony.
There is no happiness like mine.I have been eating poetry.
It's very hard to write humor.
Poetry is something that happens in universities, in creative writing programs or in English departments.
Nobody sees it happening, but the architecture of our timeIs becoming the architecture of the next time. And the dazzleOf light upon the waters is as nothing beside the changesWrought therein, just as...
A poem is a place where the conditions of beyondness and withinness are made palpable, where to imagine is to feel what it is like to be. It allows us to have the life we are denied because we are too...
And at least in poetry you should feel free to lie. That is, not to lie, but to imagine what you want, to follow the direction of the poem.
I certainly can't speak for all cultures or all societies, but it's clear that in America, poetry serves a very marginal purpose. It's not part of the cultural mainstream.
The HillI have come this far on my own legs,missing the bus, missing taxis,climbing always. One foot in front of the other,that is the way I do it.It does not bother me, the way the hill goes on.Grass...
These wrinkles are nothingThese gray hairs are nothing,This stomach which sagswith old food, these bruisedand swollen ankles, my darkening brain,they are nothing.I am the same boymy mother used to kis...
A great many people seem to think writing poetry is worthwhile, even though it pays next to nothing and is not as widely read as it should be.
Poetry is, first and last, language - the rest is filler.
And yet, in a culture like ours, which is given to material comforts, and addicted to forms of entertainment that offer immediate gratification, it is surprising that so much poetry is written.