The sound you make or don't make when you die. Samuel Coleridge A poem is an emotional machine made of words. Poetry is that which helps us live. A poem must resist the intelligence almost successfully. Like a piece of ice on a hot stove, the poem must ride on its own melting.
Poetry is an affair of sanity, of seeing things as they are.
The poet is like a tuba player in a house on fire. Crucial events surround him, threatening to devour, while he makes inappropriate music with an instrument that cannot help causing its serious manipulator to look ridiculous. All good poetry depends on the ethical relation between imagination and the image. If you only knew from what rubbish Poetry grows, knowing no shame, Like a yellow dandelion by the fence, Like burdock and goosefoot. Poems come from laziness.