"You don't make a poem with ideas, but with words"

"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"

"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"

"For many years, I thought a poem was a whisper overheard, not an aria heard"

"Of the individual poems, some are more lyric and some are more descriptive or narrative. Each poem is fixed in a moment. All those moments written or read together take on the movement and architecture of a narrative"

"The point of an experiment is not to arrive at a predetermined end point, to prove or disprove anything, but to deliver a poem that reveals much about the process taken"

"The figure a poem makes. It begins in delight and ends in wisdom... in a clarification of life - not necessarily a great clarification, such as sects and cults are founded on, but in a momentary stay against confusion"