“Poets are excellent students of blizzards and salt and broken statuary, but they are always elsewhere for the test. Any intention in the writing of poetry besides the aim to make a poem, of engaging the materials, SHOULD be disappointed. If the poet does not have the chutzpah to jeopardize habituated assumptions and practices, what will be produced will be sleep without dream, a copy of a copy of a copy.”
“but nothing can be taken back,not the leaves by the trees, the rainby the clouds. You want to take backthe ugly thing you said, but some shrapnelremains in the wound, some mud.”
“When you look ito the still, deep water,you can feel it looking back,trying to come up with the proper punishment.Fucking water, who made you the boss?”
“Kissing a rose is a dumb thing to donot just from the rose's point of view.But it's a startlike driving off a cliff's probably a finish.In beween you'll probably want to go to Mexico,get so drunk you think what you're doing is a dance.”
“Just because a thing can't be done doesn't mean it can't be did. We all look into mirrors and see phantoms. Our error is our Eros. Why is there something instead of nothing? The answer is reckless and surreal.”
“I was satisfied with haiku until I met you, jar of octopus, cuckoo's cry, 5-7-5, but now I want a russian novel, a 50-page description of you sleeping, another 75 of what you think staring at your window.”