[On Jason Mashak's “I Was Trained to See Shadows”, in his poetry book SALTY AS A LIP:] A nice bit of smooth, full-bodied, surreal story telling. I like it.

Poetry is ordinary language raised to the nth power. Poetry is boned with ideas, nerved and blooded with emotions, all held together by the delicate, tough skin of words.

The heart's actionsare neither the sentence nor its reprieve. Salt hay and thistles, above the cold granite. One bird singing back to another because it can't not.

What would the world be, once bereft Of wet and of wildness? Let them be left, O let them be left, wildness and wet; Long live the weeds and the wilderness yet.

The kind of poetry to avoid in the pretty-pretty kind that pleased our grandmothers, the kind that Longfellow and Tennyson, good poets at their best, wrote at their worst.

In my more rebellious days I tried to doubt the existence of the sacred, but the universe kept dancing and life kept writing poetry across my life. (Beyond Religion, p. 81)

Mute in that golden silence hung with green,Come down from heaven and bring me in your eyesRemembrance of all beauty that has been,And stillness from the pools of Paradise.

Sharing one umbrella,We have to hold each other,Round the waist to keep together,You ask me why I'm smiling-It's because I'm thinking,I want it to rain forever.

Everything in creation has its appointed painter or poet and remains in bondage like the princess in the fairy tale 'til its appropriate liberator comes to set it free.

Here they have no time for the fine gracesof poetry, unless it freely growsin deep compulsion, like water in the well,woven into the texture of the soilin a strong pattern.

This man has talent, that man geniusAnd here's the strange and cruel difference:Talent gives pence and his reward is gold,Genius gives gold and gets no more than pence.

You will hear thunder and remember me, And think: she wanted storms. The rim Of the sky will be the colour of hard crimson, And your heart, as it was then, will be on fire.

I'll say I love you,Which will lead, of course,to disappointment,but those words unsaidpoison every next moment.I will try to disappoint youbetter than anyone else has.

The difference between the poet and the mathematician is that the poet tries to get his head into the heavens while the mathematician tries to get the heavens into his head.

[Short Talk on the Sensation of Airplane Takeoff] Well you know I wonder, it could be love running toward my life with its arms up yelling let’s buy it what a bargain!