"A poet's work is to name the unnameable, to point at frauds, to take sides, start arguments, shape the world, and stop it going to sleep."
"I’m not very good at praying, but what I experience when I’m writing a poem is close to prayer."
Example sheds a genial ray
Of light that men are apt to borrow.
So first improve yourself today.
And then improve your friends tomorrow.
"A poet is somebody who feels, and who expresses his feelings through words. This may sound easy. It isn’t. A lot of people think or believe or know they feel — but that’s thinking or believing or knowing; not feeling. And poetry is feeling — not knowing or believing or thinking. Almost anybody can learn to think or believe or know, but not a single human being can be taught to feel. Why? Because whenever you think or you believe or you know, you’re a lot of other people: but the moment you feel, you’re nobody-but-yourself. To be nobody-but-yourself — in a world which is doing its best, night and day, to make you everybody else — means to fight the hardest battle which any human being can fight; and never stop fighting."
The truth will never be complete
In any mind or time. It will never
Be reduced to an explanation.
What you have is only a sack of fragments
Never to be filled: old bones, fossils,
Facts, scraps of writing, sprawls of junk.
You know yourself only poorly and in part,
The best and the worst maybe forgotten.
However you arrange the pieces, however
Authentic, a story is what you’ll have,
An artifact, for better or worse.
So go ahead. Gather your findings into
A plausible arrangement. Make a story.
Show how love and joy, beauty and goodness,
Shine out amongst the rubble.
Instructions for living a life:
Pay attention.
Be astonished.
Tell about it.
"God cannot be me. It is clear that She lives in portraits of other people."
"The uniqueness of interesting poetry swallows up every proposed schema : the talent of the great & gifted poet takes a certain essential aspect of poetry - its capacity for obliterating and transcending our habitual mental & philosophical categories - and multiplies it exponentially."
"The poet only asks to get his head into the heavens. It is the logician who seeks to get the heavens into his head. And it is his head that splits."
we are each other's harvest:
we are each other's business:
we are each other's magnitude and bond.