“A poet's hope: to be, like some valley cheese, local, but prized elsewhere.”

“no poet can know what his poem is going to be like until he has written it.”

“You will be a poet because you will always be humiliated.”

“In the eyes of others a man is a poet if he has written one good poem. In his own he is only a poet at the moment when he is making his last revision to a new poem. The moment before, he was still only a potential poet; the moment after, he is a man who has ceased to write poetry, perhaps forever.”

“Recipe for the upbringing of a poet: 'As much neurosis as the child can bear.”

“A poet is, before anything else, a person who is passionately in love with language.”

“For poetry makes nothing happen: it survives In the valley of its making where executivesWould never want to tamper, flows on southFrom ranches of isolation and the busy griefs,Raw towns that we believe and die in; it survives,A way of happening, a mouth.”