“Poetry is a way of looking at the world for the first time.”

“Modern poetry, for me, began not in English at all but in Spanish, in the poems of Lorca.”

“Poetry is like making a joke. If you get one word wrong at the end of a joke, you've lost the whole thing.”

“Through all of youth I was looking for youwithout knowing what I was looking for”

“part memory part distance remainingmine in the ways that I learn to miss you”

“Send me out into another lifelord because this one is growing faintI do not think it goes all the way”

“We begin to say something that cannot be said. When you see on the front page a woman in Iraq who's just seen her husband blown up, you see her there, her mouth wide open, you know the sound coming out of her, a howl of grief and pain -- that's the beginning of language.Trying to express that, it's inexpressible, and poetry is really to say what can't be said. And that's why people turn to it in these moments. They don't know how to say this, [but] part of them feels that maybe a poem will say it. It won't say it, but it'll come closer to saying it than anything else will.I think there are always two sides, and one of them is the unsayable. The utterly singular. Who you are; who you can never tell anybody. And on the other hand, there is what you can express. How do we know about this thing we talk about? Because we talk about it. We're using words. And the words never say it, but the words are all we have to say it.”