“Every poem holds the unspeakable inside it. The unsayable... The thing that you can't really say because it's too complicated. It's too complex for us. Every poem has that silence deep in the center of it.”

“Because every book of art, be it a poem or a cupola, is understandably a self-portrait of its author, we won't strain ourselves too hard trying to distinguish between the author's persona and the poem's lyrical hero. As a rule, such distinctions are quite meaningless, if only because a lyrical hero is invariably an author's self-projection.”

“Love leads us to write poetry because love improves our hearing; like prayer, poetry is every bit as much about listening as it is about speaking. To 'get' the poem is to hear the eloquence of the silence that it calls forth through its manifestation of love.”

“You can tell it's a poem because it's swimming in a little gel pack of white space. That shows it's a poem.”

“One of the things a writer is for is to say the unsayable, speak the unspeakable and ask difficult questions.”

“You can woo a girl with a poem, but you can't hold onto her with a poem. Not even with a poetry movement.”