“American poetry has been part of a culture in conflict....We are a people tending toward democracy at the level of hope; at another level, the economy of the nation, the empire of business within the republic, both include in their basic premise the idea of perpetual warfare”

“We are against war and the sources of war. We are for poetry and the sources of poetry.”

“The fear of poetry is an indication that we are cut off from our own reality.”

“If there were no poetry on any day in the world, poetry would be invented that day. For there would be an intolerable hunger.”

“breathe in experience breathe out poetry”

“No one wants to read poetry. You have to make it impossible for them to put the poem down--impossible for them to stop reading it, word after word. You have to keep them from closing the book.”

“Always our wars have been our confessions of weakness”