"I've never read a political poem that's accomplished anything. Poetry makes things happen, but rarely what the poet wants"

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

"It is the timber of poetry that wears most surely, and there is no timber that has not strong roots among the clay and worms"

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

"Poetry is an echo, asking a shadow to dance"

"Pure mathematics is, in its way, the poetry of logical ideas"

"We don't attempt to have any theme for a number of the anthology, or to have any particular sequence. We just put in things that we like, and then we try to alternate the prose and the poetry"

"Concrete poets continue to turn out beautiful things, but to me they're more visual than oral, and they almost really belong on the wall rather than in a book. I haven't the least idea of where poetry is going"

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

"Poetry is of so subtle a spirit, that in the pouring out of one language into another it will evaporate"

"I think Ginsberg has done more harm to the craft that I honor and live by than anybody else by reducing it to a kind of mean that enables the most dubious practitioners to claim they are poets because they think, If the kind of thing Ginsberg does is poetry, I can do that"