“Summer in the trees! “It is time to strangle several bad poets.” /The yellow hobbyhorse rocks to and fro, and from the chimney / Drops the Strangler! The white and pink roses are slightly agitated by the struggle, / But afterwards beside the dead “poet” they cuddle up comfortingly against their vase. They are safer now, no one will compare them to the sea. / Here on the railroad train, one more time, is the Strangler. / He is going to get that one there, who is on his way to a poetry reading. / Agh! Biff! A body falls to the moving floor.”

“I've had trouble with criticism, I guess. It's hard to know what role criticism plays in either encouraging poets or in getting other people to read them.”

“Maybe poetry took the life out of both of them,Idea and friendship.”

“I love you as a sheriff searches for a walnut / That will solve a murder case unsolved for years / Because the murderer left it in the snow beside a window / Through which he saw her head, connecting with / Her shoulders by a neck, and laid a red /Roof in her heart. For this we lived a thousand years; / For this we love, and we live because we love, we are not /Inside a bottle, thank goodness! ----- from "To You”

“I was excited by what my painter friends were doing, and they seemed to be interested in our poetry too, and that was a wonderful little, fizzy sort of world.”

“I'm a writer who likes to be influenced.”

“I don't know where you'd find such a magazine." ~ on the stipulations set by a benefactor to the Harvard Advocate that the staff contain no Jews, homosexuals, or drunks”