“Poems are difficult to silence.”

“It is always difficult for poets to believe that one says their poems are bad not because one is a fiend, but because their poems are bad.”

“A poetic form is essentially a codified pattern of silence. We have a little silence at the end of a line, a bigger one at the end of a stanza, and a huge one at the end of the poem. The semantic weight of the poem tends to naturally distribute itself according to that pattern of silence, paying especial care to the sounds and meanings of the words and phrases that resonate into the little empty acoustic of the line-ending, or the connecting hallway of stanza-break, or the big church of the poem's end.”

“My poems are more my silence than my speech. Just as music is a kind of quiet. Sounds are needed only to unveil the various layers of silence.”

“Comme certaines musiquesLe poème fait chanter le silence,Amène jusqu’à toucherUn autre silence,Encore plus silence.As certain musicThe poem makes sing to silenceBring to the point of touchingAnother silenceEven more silence.”

“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.”