“Poems are not easy to start, and they’re not easy to finish. There’s a great pleasure in – I wouldn’t say ease, but maybe kind of a fascinated ease that accompanies the actual writing of the poem. I find it very difficult to get started.”

You describe your life in negative terms you will find that this will reinforce your mind’s negative emotions and make you unhappy and even more susceptible to feeling unhappy in the future.

Urges … every man has urges. But the true measure of man is to admit them, to learn to control them. The Shield used to refer to themselves as the most dominant force in our universe. But that ain’t the way I remember it.

Until recently, I thought ‘occasional poetry’ meant that you wrote only occasionally.

I was influenced by the Beats because I actually just began to commit adolescence around 1955, when “Howl” and Rebel Without a Cause and a lot of other new things were popping up.

But some nights, I must tell you, I go down there after everyone has fallen asleep. I swim back and forth in the echoing blackness. I sing a love song as well as I can, lost for a while in the home of the rain.

You, quote, find your voice, unquote, when you are able to invent this one character who resembles you, obviously, and probably is more like you than anyone else on earth, but is not the equivalent to you.

When you get a poem [in a public place], it happens to you so suddenly that you don’t have time to deploy your anti-poetry deflector shields that were installed in high school.

I knew that poets seemed to be miserable.

It is as if one by one, the memories you used to harbor decided to retire to the Southern Hemisphere of the brain.

The pen is an instrument of discovery rather than just a recording implement. If you write a letter of resignation or something with an agenda, you’re simply using a pen to record what you have thought out.

Nationalism is a type of insanity in which the boundaries of a land replace God.

Another trouble with poetry – and I’m gonna stop the list at two – is the presence of presumptuousness in poetry.

There are just long gaps where I can’t find a point of insertion, I can’t find a good opening line.

As soon as I start to write I’m very aware, I’m trying to be aware that a reader just might well pick up this poem, a stranger. So when I’m writing – and I think that this is important for all writers – I’m trying to be a writer and a reader back and forth.

I write with a Uni-Ball Onyx Micropoint on nine-by-seven bound notebooks made by a Canadian company called Blueline. After I do a few drafts, I type up the poem on a Macintosh G3 and then send it out the door.

That’s the real question for me, is getting the reader into the poem and then taking the reader somewhere, because I think of poetry as a kind of form of travel writing.

You can’t eat language but it eases thirst.

In order to ease my condition I took up Euclid’s Elements and read for the first time his doctrine of ratio, which I found treated there in a manner entirely new to me.

That hunger of the flesh, that longing for ease, that terror of incarceration, that insistence on tribal honour being obeyed: all of that exists, and it exists everywhere.

If knowledge and foresight are too penetrating and deep, unify them with ease and sincerity.

But still remember, if you mean to please, To press your point with modesty and ease.

O ye rich ones on earth! The poor in your midst are My trust; guard ye My trust, and be not intent only on your own ease.

I’m not a social person. Not that I’m not at ease. I’m pretty good, but it bores me. Not the people, but the whole thing. What for? It’s not very productive. I only want to do what I have to do: fashion, photography, books. And that’s all.

No rebellious heart is ever at ease with paths established by others.