“To work, her dumb lunge says,is to move a certain mass...through a certain distance,is to pull your weight and feelexact and equal to it.Feel dragged upon. And buoyant.”

“We want what the woman wanted in the prison queue in Leningrad, standing there with cold and whispering for fear, enduring the terror of Stalin's regime and asking the poet Anna Akhmatova if she could describe it all, if her art was equal to it.”

“If self is a location, so is love:Bearings taken, markings, cardinal points,Options, obstinacies, dug heels, and distance,Here and there and now and then, a stance.”

“The aim of poetry and the poet is finally to be of service, to ply the effort of the individual into the larger work of the community as a whole.”

“Now it’s high watermark and floodtide in the heartand time to go.The sea-nymphs in the spraywill be the chorus now.What’s left to say?Suspect too much sweet-talkbut never close your mind.It was a fortunate windthat blew me here. I leavehalf-ready to believe that a crippled trust might walkand the half-true rhyme is love.”

“In off the moors, down through the mist beams, god-cursed Grendel came greedily loping.”

“I suppose I'm saying that defiance is actually part of the lyric job”