For two decades, I’ve maintained a list of quotes I like by poets, writers, and thinkers I find interesting. This post is part of that series. All posts in the series are organized alphabetically. Some poets and writers have their own dedicated pages.

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All of which is to say, I write poems, I don’t write sermons.

All the well-made, passionless, wooden little poems one sees everywhere nowadays, panting like tongues in the books and magazines. But poetry is not a tongue. Poetry is the dark beast with its mouth open, and you’ve got to walk down that tongue and into the windy mouth. And you’ve got to sing while you walk (33).

“Bar Giamaica, 1959-60” is from a section of The Southern Cross in which each poem—and there are twenty in the section—answers to some technical problem I gave myself. Since technical, these problems are formal by definition, some more exaggerated than others. One poem contains no verbs, for instance, while the following one has a verb in every line. There is a poem that tries to imitate, however shallowly, a musical form, and another that tries to assemble itself as a painting might be composed. There are portraits of the poet with people he could not possibly have been seen with, a poem written entirely in hotel rooms (very difficult for me), a poem that was written at one sitting and without changing one word later (a first for me), a poem that has two endings, one on top of the other, a poem with no reference point, two poems whose major imagery comes from the work of another poet. And so on.

[On Cézanne’s paintings] I think they are even more personally engaged because he is the landscape. And that’s what I would like to become. I would like to become the mental landscape that I write about (103).

I’m a primitive poet, I think. I trust my ear, I trust my instincts because I’m not particularly well-read or learned (86).

If, as Keats has it, Melancholy has her shrine in the temple of Delight, then Experimentation has hers in the temple of Form (121).

[On poetry endings] If you end it on a statement, you’d better have one that looks as though it were squeezed out of the poem, and not just tacked on at the end.

[On his concept of God] It was altered by the same things that formed it. I hold it now like a very delicate object, careful not to drop it (109).

[On Emily Dickinson] She wrote about What Mattered, landscape and eternity, the here and the there, the now and then.

Such a line as has “pippiroo, pippera, pippirum” in it, the evasion of emotion. This is very shaky ground for me (96).

The correct image is always a seed—it contains its own explanation, and defines itself (28).

The Jazz Age is over, the mid-century posturing and frenetics and self-important divisions seem to have passed, or at least settled, and the long, high-energy, self-contained imagistic line’s time has come.

The secret of the universe is Form, even if poems are not the secret of the universe. They’re only clues to the secret of the universe.

Unless you love the music of words, you are merely a pamphleteer (24).

Well, I don’t want to tell a story. That’s why I quote the Chinese student who told Pound years ago that poetry is made up of gists and piths — from one meaningful thing to the next, from one strong image to the next, from one musical moment to the next. That’s how I like to put poems together, rather than an overall narrative story (152).

When I write to myself, l’m writing to the landscape, and the landscape is a personification of the people on the other side. That would be my ideal audience (112).

When the finger of God appears, it’s usually the wrong finger (22).