If Wishes Were Stories, Beggars Would Read.

A Poet Is A Man Who Manages, In A Lifetime Of Standing Out In Thunderstorms, To Be Struck By Lightning Five Or Six Times.

Most Poets, Most Good Poets Even, No Longer Have The Heart To Write About What Is Most Terrible In The World Of The Present: The Bombs Waiting Beside The Rockets, The Hundreds Of Millions Staring Into The Temporary Shelter Of Their Television Sets, The Decline Of The West That Seems Less A Decline Than The Fall Preceding An Explosion.

A Correct Answer Is Like An Affectionate Kiss, Goethe Said; A Correct Answer, Gertrude Would Have Said, Is Like A Slap In The Face.

If Sometimes We Are Bogged Down In Lines Full Of "corybulous", "hypogeum", "plangent", "irrefragably", "glozening", "tellurian", "conclamant", Sometimes We Are Caught Up In The Soaring Rapture Of Something Unprecedented, Absolutely Individual.

From My Mother's Sleep I Fell Into The State, And I Hunched In Its Belly Till My Wet Fur Froze. Six Miles From Earth, Loosed From The Dream Of Life, I Woke To Black Flak And The Nightmare Fighters. When I Died They Washed Me Out Of The Turret With A Hose.