"In a poem the excitement has to maintain itself. I am governed by the pull of the sentence as the pull of a fabric is governed by gravity"

"If you cannot be a poet, be the poem"

"To read a poem is to hear it with our eyes; to hear it is to see it with our ears"

"I think of my peace paintings as one long poem, with each painting being a single stanza"

"Scientific understanding is often beautiful, a profoundly aesthetic experience which gives pleasure not unlike the reading of a great poem"

"With the question of the effect of a poem, the topic of investigation shifts from that of textual autonomy to textual reception - to the issue of what we actually look for or find in reading a poem"

"I've thought of the last line of some poems for years and tried them out, It wouldn't work because the last line was much too beautiful for the poem"

"The heart of the matter seems to me to be the direct interaction between one's making a poem in English and a poem in the language that one understands and values. I don't see how you can do it otherwise"

"In a manner of speaking, the poem is its own knower, neither poet nor reader knowing anything that the poem says apart from the words of the poem"

"A revolutionary poem will not tell you who or when to kill, what and when to burn, or even how to theorize. It reminds you... where and when and how you are living and might live, it is a wick of desire"

"For what is a poem but a hazardous attempt at self-understanding: it is the deepest part of autobiography"