Here are some quotes from the superb writer’s oeuvre:
“Writing is not therapy. That’s the last thing it is. I still have my grief.”
“I think I try with my poems to create a beginning space. I always seem to be erasing and starting over, rather than picking up where I left off, even if I wind up taking up the same themes. This is probably one reason that I change form and style so much, out of a desire to find a new beginning, which is always the true beginning.”
“Well, there aren’t any borders. What people have been doing for the last couple million years has been creating these mental compartments so they won’t have dreams spilling over into regular life, that sort of thing. I have this experience where I dream at the same time that I’m awake. It’s really irritating. Everyone always says it must be wonderful but it isn’t, it’s terrible. There’s a whole part of civilization that’s dedicated itself to walling off certain parts of the psyche. That’s why we know nothing, we know nothing at all. All we know how to do is to make new machines. That is the death of us.”
“We’re all being this. What I’m making is a place for all of us to see that we’re all being this, that we’re all being this intense and light-filled existing. That we’re all poetry.”
“It’s about the odd points of connection in a life. There are times when you look back, and everything that was back there rushes up here. And poets can be engaged with that process. It’s part of what makes them poets. It’s something that happens inside poetic stress: you get to this point where it’s like this black hole, and then everything just comes in, past and future.”
“I think that when we die, we talk to one another and thereby hold the cosmos together. The only possible thing that’s holding everything together is communication […]. That’s all there is. And obviously you don’t disappear, because there’s nowhere to go. There’s no nothing to go to because there’s no nothing. And it’s obvious there’s no nothing. So we become communication.”
“The hardest place is the beginning. You never know how to begin.”
“I always think of poems as something to be performed. And I always think of how they’re going to sound. There wouldn’t be poetry without that. It’s utterly important. And people should read poetry aloud. Reading aloud is key. I read each poem aloud in my room after I’ve written it, and I often picture myself in a room performing it.”
“The tyrant is what enslaves us to our forms. The tyrant is the form of our life, the form of our politics, the form of our universities, the form of our knowledge, our thinking we know something. All of that is the tyrant.”
“Voice is everything.”
“And if I say I represent the dead, your head has to kind of turn, and you have to think about something besides poetics. Poetics! As if how people say poetry should be written is of any consequence at all or any importance. Critics create value. We don’t need any value, we need poetry.”
“As a poet you can talk to anyone you want to, and you can write down anything you want to. You don’t make any money, so it doesn’t matter what you say. You can give yourself great pleasure just speaking to whoever or whatever might exist. But also, you do rip yourself open if you go through the experiences I have, and you do stand on the chasm between life and death. There is communication, I am certain of this. I’ve also been ill and in my illness I’ve reached out further. The more defective you become the more you learn, the more you know, the more shamanic you’ll be.”
“Every election everyone turns into idiots, partisan idiots. All these very intelligent people I know become total partisans in the way they think. They lose a sense that there are all these other kinds of people in the United States who haven’t been represented at all in a while and may have some thoughts that are just as important as theirs.”
“I think words are what we have. I think there might be some other kind of language made up of something else, that we used to speak or that we’ll speak when we’re dead. I’m always working on what that might be.”
“A poem comes to exist somewhere between the mind and the vocal equipment, also with the hand or hands involved (sometimes I feel that my writing hand is speaking). Also between the poet and the poet’s audience (reader). But a poem is spoken, it has always been spoken since ancient times. It would be too easy to say that the words on the page stand in for what it is—that isn’t quite correct, but it doesn’t just exist on the page. It has to be said, and prose doesn’t, most bad poetry is acting like prose with linebreaks (or not). A poem is composed of vibrations jostling each other, auditory but also visual—those letters tremble too! And I certainly do. The point is probably that a poem isn’t verified until it’s read aloud, live. I can’t tell anything about it till this happens.”
“We’re in a situation where there are too many people, with diminishing resources, in a rather rapidly changing climate. Really, people are supposed to figure out what they need, and get rid of the rest—and they don’t need much. Though they do need art.”
“I think a poet has an alone place in their head, always, though it probably has to be maintained—if it’s lost, you probably stop writing. When you’re crowded, you mostly stay aware that it’s there and try to get to it as soon as you can. It’s the place, partly, from which you observe and listen, so you’ll have something to write later.”
“I prefer loneliness to alternatives I can envision.”
“The poet place I’m talking about—the mental space—is quite detached, and detachment is probably its most salient characteristic. It’s a deeper place than the reading place, and a different one from the one in which I talk with the dead. It’s the automatic, cold place you go to to write a poem. That’s the place you have to cultivate to keep writing.”
“I meditate a lot on whether language really is words, or whether language exists in an apartness from everything else, or what all our connectedness might really be.”
“Poetic language exposes what’s happening, if you’re true to it, the language, and the process through which you get it. But you don’t always understand a poem when you write it, not entirely.”
“I am persuaded that I am changing the world.”
“But I do truly believe that the cosmos, universe, whatever is there, is composed of communication—that is its basis. Everything communicates. Screens exist in order to obfuscate that fact and to try to make it easier to be nothing except part of a great machine with medieval aristocrats in charge. No one has any skills anymore, they don’t dare sing their own music, they have to listen to whatever they’re told the music is, sung by an expert.”
“[O]ur production of the world, our interpretation of it, what we’ve been told to experience and what we’ve been told we have to do, both bore and distress me. I don’t want to live in someone else’s dream.”
“Poetry has different tones of voice and vocabularies available to it and can even mix them. Environmental ruin is something we experience all the time now but as part of everything else we are doing and thinking; poetry is good at presenting inside and outside, mind and experience, imagination and outer circumstance at the same time. It can be dense and clear and forlorn and yet serene all at the same time.”
“There’s a now long tradition of nontradition: therefore nothing looks new to me. Though it might be. What’s really new when something’s new is a change of consciousness or sensibility in poetry, and that dictates novelty of form if a new form’s involved. It’s not so easy to change consciousness or that evident that there’s been a change. It comes from inside you the poet. In other words you have to listen for the poem demanding to be written, to the exclusion of what your friends might say should be written, or the school or group you seem to be associated with, or whatever theory of novelty or shouldness—’you should write like this!’—is being passed around.”
“The poet serves poetry, not society, which is a group fantasy. Poetry does make for change, but it does it by being rather singular. It is involved in the creation of reality out of tiny sounds and meanings, sort of like particle physics but on the creation level. I know this sounds highfalutin, but I believe it.”
“People think you’re only supposed to heal good people, but actually you’re supposed to heal everyone. There are no sides in the healing. […] No one’s excluded. It’s a very hard place for people to go because everybody’s on a side. But things have to heal on both sides for anything to happen, really.”
“Poems, a lot of the time, are supposedly not made up . . . but they’re all made up. Everything’s invented. The notion of concreteness is therefore very slippery. I’ve always wanted there to be something to see, and poetry is about the tangible and what you can hear. It’s about the form, it’s about voices, and it generally is about telling things. We tell each other things, and so I allow a lot of voices in my poems. I can’t seem to keep them out. I consider them to be concrete entities. At this point, when I write a poem, it seems like a community of voices. My voice is perhaps overpowering, but I don’t know what my voice is. So then other voices come in and I try to let them speak, but I don’t always know where they come from. I make them up. Sometimes they’re people on the street, and sometimes they’re people I know. But that’s concrete. Voices are concrete.”
“We have to choose something. We have to choose something to be in the new universe. So anyone gets to paste on something. And there’s a continuous choosing all the time that the poem’s going on. […] Everything’s also evanescent, transitory, and what’s left is a sense of each other’s presences. And that’s not pasted on. I mean, we’re really there. We’re really here. We’re real. So there’s something behind all that. A real form of us inside us that isn’t always picked up on by the outer world. The most concrete part of us is invisible.”
“Nobody understands what thinking is. When we think, what goes on in the mind is completely unexplained. I’ve never read a proper explanation of it. There’s a mental space and there are many things that happen inside of it. Some of the things that happen inside of it involve thinking in words, but mostly we don’t think in words. If you try hard, you can think in words. When people are writing, like, papers, they think in words. But most of the time they don’t think in words.”
“Poetry remakes the future.”
“If you’re writing poetry, you’re not doing anything bad. You’re just sitting by yourself writing something that is likely not to be published or to affect anyone. So, it’s a good thing. Something is happening where we are constantly deprived of the ability to be alone and get space around ourselves. I think that’s one of the things we should all be demanding.”
