Occupation: Poet Birth: April 11, 1934 Death: November 29, 2014
Pain is filtered in a poem so that it becomes finally, in the end, pleasure..
For some of us, the less said about the way we do things the better..
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..
In a field I am the absence of field.That is always the case. Wherever I am, I am what is missing. When I walk I part the air and always the air move….
Each moment is a place you've never been..
The future is always beginning now..
I haven’t met God and I haven’t been to heaven, so I’m skeptical..
When I walk I part the air and always the air moves in to fill the spaces where my body's been..
These wrinkles are nothing These gray hairs are nothing, This stomach which sags with old food, these bruised and swollen ankles, my darkening brain,….
A life is not sufficiently elevated for poetry, unless, of course, the life has been made into an art..
If every head of state and every government official spent an hour a day reading poetry we'd live in a much more humane and decent world..
Even this late it happens the coming of love, the coming of light. You wake and the candles are lit as if by themselves, stars gather, dreams pour in….
Ink runs from the corners of my mouth. There is no happiness like mine. I have been eating poetry..
We’re only here for a short while. And I think it’s such a lucky accident, having been born, that we’re almost obliged to pay attention..
She stood beside me for years, or was it a moment? I cannot remember. Maybe I loved her, maybe I didn't. There was a house, and then no house. There ….
No voice comes from outer space, from the folds of dust and carpets of wind to tell us that this is the way it was meant to happen, that if only we k….
Once you start describing nothingness, you end up with somethingness..
Poems not only demand patience, they demand a kind of surrender. You must give yourself up to them. This is the real food for a poet: other poems, no….
We are reading the story of our lives As though we were in it As though we had written it..
Poetry is, first and last, language - the rest is filler..
The burial of feelings has begun..