“Too much is almost enough”

“Poems 1959-2009_I turn into the man they photograph.I think I'll ask him for his autograph.He's older than I am and more distinguished.The beauty of the boy has been extinguished.He smiles a lot and then not.Hauteur is the new hot.He tilts his nose up and looks imperious.He wants to make sure he looks serious.He smiles at the photographer but notThe camera. He thinks cold is the look that's hot.You know the poems. It's an experience.The way that Shylock is a Shakespearience.A Jew found frozen on the mountain at the howling summit,Immortally preserved singing to the dying planet from it.”

“July 4th fireworks exhale over the Hudson sadly.It is beautiful that they have to disappear.It's like the time you said I love you madly.That was an hour ago. It's been a fervent year.”

“Musik und Leben hängen irgendwie zusammen, das heißt, man hört nur die Musik, die irgendwie zum eigenen Leben passt. Wenn sich das Leben aber ändert, wird auch die Musik, die man hören will, eine andere und die Beziehung zu den alten Melodien, die man mal sehr mochte, ändert sich.”

“There must always be a fringe of the experimental in literature--poems bizarre in form and curious in content, stories that overreach for what has not hitherto been put in story form, criticism that mingles a search for new truth with bravado. We should neither scoff at this trial margin nor take it too seriously. Without it, literature becomes inert and complacent. But the everyday person's reading is not, ought not to be, in the margin. He asks for a less experimental diet, and his choice is sound. If authors and publishers would give him more heed they would do wisely. They are afraid of the swarming populace who clamor for vulgar sensation (and will pay only what it is worth), and they are afraid of petulant literati who insist upon sophisticated sensation (and desire complimentary copies). The stout middle class, as in politics and industry, has far less influence than its good sense and its good taste and its ready purse deserve.”

“The incarnation is "a kind of vast joke whereby the Creator of the ends of the earth comes among us in diapers... Until we too have taken the idea of the God-man seriously enough to be scandalized by it, we have not taken it as seriously as it demands to be taken.”

“I not only have my secrets, I am my secrets. And you are yours. Our secrets are human secrets, and our trusting each other enough to share them with each other has much to do with the secret of what it means to be human.”