“There’s only the writing, which I admit to knowing very little about. But then it’s probably best not to know. It allows one to work without expectation. Best to let the poem do the thinking while we concern ourselves with what’s called the personal life.”

“I never liked the term “experimental writing,” but what else is a prose poem? Having written a number of them, I still don’t know how they’re written.”

“I think, therefore I am, said a man whose mother quickly hit him on the head, saying, I hit my son on the head, therefore I am.No no, you've got it all wrong, cried the man.So she hit him on the head again and cried, therefore I am.You're not, not that way; you're supposed to think, not hit, cried the man.. . . I think, therefore I am, said the man.I hit, therefore we both are, the hitter and the one who gets hit, said the man's mother.But at this point the man had ceased to be; unconscious he could not think. But his mother could. So she thought, I am, and so is my unconscious son, even if he doesn't know it . . .”

“…description is deadly to a prose poem.”

“Perhaps I should kiss the face of the kitchen clock for luck. Perhaps its little hands with rapture would encircle my neck and we might be happy. I am sure happiness is not too far away”

“It is very difficult to stop feeling.”

“ Let us consider the farmer who makes his straw hat hissweetheart; or the old woman who makes a floor lamp her son;or the young woman who has set herself the task of scrapingher shadow off a wall.... Let us consider the old woman who wore smoked cows’tongues for shoes and walked a meadow gathering cow chipsin her apron; or a mirror grown dark with age that was givento a blind man who spent his nights looking into it, whichsaddened his mother, that her son should be so lost invanity.... Let us consider the man who fried roses for his dinner,whose kitchen smelled like a burning rose garden; or the manwho disguised himself as a moth and ate his overcoat, and fordessert served himself a chilled fedora.... ”