That's the way it is with poetry: When it is incomprehensible it seems profound, and when you understand it, it is only ridiculous.

I start off but I don’t know where I’m going; I try this avenue and that avenue, that turns out to be a dead end, this is a dead end, and so on. The search takes a long time and I have to back-track often.

The secret title of every good poem might be ‘Tenderness.

Perhaps poetry will be the canary in the mine-shaft warning us of what’s to come.

Prose is walking; poetry is flying.

There are two versions to every poem – the crying version and the straight version.

Little sleep’s-head sprouting hair in the moonlight, when I come back we will go out together, we will walk out together among, the ten thousand things, each scratched too late with such knowledge, the wages of dying is love.

The wages of dying are love.

Love is the religion that bereaves the bereft.

To me, poetry is somebody standing up, so to speak, and saying, with as little concealment as possible, what it is for him or her to be on earth at this moment.