“Poetry is not efficient. If you want to learn how to cook a lobster, it’s probably best not to look to poetry. But if you want to see the word lobster in all its reactant oddity, its pied beauty, as if for the first time, go to poetry. And if you want to know what it’s like to be that lobster in the pot, that’s in poetry too.”

“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.”

“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.”

“People who read poetry have heard about the burning bush, but when you write poetry, you sit inside the burning bush.”

“It’s a beautiful way to put it: Leave the poetry in what you make. When something becomes too polished, it loses its soul. It seems robotic.”

“It’s not the word made flesh we want in writing, in poetry and fiction, but the flesh made word”

“Easy in but not easily out, as the lobster said in the lobster pot!”