In a lot of ways, the task at hand for any poem is to approach something that defies exactness or definition with a kind of exactness or precision.
Every word was once a poem. Every new relation is a new word.
I stalk certain words. . . I catch them in mid-flight, as they buzz past, I trap them, clean them, peel them, I set myself in front of the dish, they have a crystalline texture to me, vibrant, ivory, vegetable, oily, like fruit, like algae, like agates, like olives. . . I stir them, I shake them, I drink them, I gulp them down, I mash them, I garnish them. . . I leave them in my poem like stalactites, like slivers of polished wood, like coals, like pickings from a shipwreck, gifts from the waves. . . Everything exists in the word.
Art is its own excuse, and it's either Art or it's something else. It's either a poem or a piece of cheese.
There are two versions to every poem – the crying version and the straight version
if Saint Bruce doesn't like your poem, he chops your head off.
The reader who is illuminated is, in a real sense, the poem.
Peace goes into the making of a poem as flour goes into the making of bread.
I can't tell you where a poem comes from, what it is, or what it is for: nor can any other man. The reason I can't tell you is that the purpose of a poem is to go past telling, to be recognised by burning.
Instead of noting down things I’m unlikely to forget, I will write a poem. Even if I have never written one before and even if I never do so again, I will at least know that I once had the courage to put my feelings into words.
The language of the poem is the language of particulars.
As naturally as the oak bears an acorn and the vine a gourd, man bears a poem, either spoken or done.
Klopstock was questioned regarding the meaning of a passage in his poem. He replied, 'God and I both knew what it meant once; now God alone knows. '
I feel that anything is possible in a poem.
A poem is never finished, only abandoned.
Each poem leads you to the questions it makes sense to ask it.
The voice does go up in a poem. It is an address, even if it is to oneself.
. . . the poem reminds us of what we ourselves know, but did not know we knew; reminds us, above all, of what we are.
Ever since I was first read to, then started reading to myself, there has never been a line read that I didn't hear. As my eyes followed the sentence, a voice was saying it silently to me. It isn't my mother's voice, or the voice of any person I can identify, certainly not my own. It is human, but inward, and it is inwardly that I listen to it. It is to me the voice of the story or the poem itself.
[Referring to Fourier's mathematical theory of the conduction of heat]. . . Fourier's great mathematical poem.