“Truly fine poetry must be read aloud. A good poem does not allow itself to be read in a low voice or silently. If we can read it silently, it is not a valid poem: a poem demands pronunciation. Poetry always remembers that it was an oral art before it was a written art. It remembers that it was first song.”

“In an isolated region from Iran there is this wall tower, windowless, doorless, not very tall. In its only room with arched walls and the stamped earth as its floor, there’s a wooden table and a bench. In this round cell a man that looks like me is writing in signs that i don’t understand a long poem about a man who in another round cell is writing a poem about a man in another round cell. Endless series; nobody will ever read what prisoners write. ”

“The gods weave misfortunes for men, so that the generations to come will have something to sing about.” Mallarmé repeats, less beautifully, what Homer said; “tout aboutit en un livre,” everything ends up in a book. The Greeks speak of generations that will sing; Mallarmé speaks of an object, of a thing among things, a book. But the idea is the same; the idea that we are made for art, we are made for memory, we are made for poetry, or perhaps we are made for oblivion. But something remains, and that something is history or poetry, which are not essentially different.”

“Let others pride themselves about how many pages they have written; I'd rather boast about the ones I've read.”

“I speak in a poem of the ancient food of heroes: humiliation, unhappiness, discord. Those things are given to us to transform, so that we may make from the miserable circumstances of our lives things that are eternal, or aspire to be so.”

“The fact is that poetry is not the books in the library . . . Poetry is the encounter of the reader with the book, the discovery of the book.”

“Poem Written in a Copy of BeowulfAt various times, I have asked myself what reasonsmoved me to study, while my night came down,without particular hope of satisfaction,the language of the blunt-tongued Anglo-Saxons.Used up by the years, my memoryloses its grip on words that I have vainlyrepeated and repeated. My life in the same wayweaves and unweaves its weary history.Then I tell myself: it must be that the soulhas some secret, sufficient way of knowingthat it is immortal, that its vast, encompassingcircle can take in all, can accomplish all.Beyond my anxiety, beyond this writing,the universe waits, inexhaustible, inviting.”