We all use phrases such as ‘the ordinary world,’ ‘ordinary life,’ ‘the ordinary course of events.’ But in the language of poetry, nothing is usual or normal. Not a single stone and not a single cloud above it. Not a single day and not a single night after it. And above all, not a single existence, not anyone’s existence in this world.

Poetry: Language against which we have no defences.

Poetry is what happens when nothing else can.

Poetry makes nothing happen.

There is nothing at all that can be talked about adequately, and the whole art of poetry is to say what can't be said.

There is not a particle of life which does not bear poetry within it

There is no poetry where there are no mistakes.

Every word was once a poem.

I would say poetry is language charged with emotion. It's words, rhythmically organized . . . A poem is a complete little universe. It exists separately. Any poem that has any worth expresses the whole life of the poet. It gives a view of what the poet is.

There is the buried language and there is the individual vocabulary, and the process of poetry is one of excavation and of self-discovery. Tonally the individual voice is a dialect; it shapes its own accent, its own vocabulary and melody in defiance of an imperial concept of language, the language of Ozymandias, libraries and dictionaries, law courts and critics, and churches, universities, political dogma, the diction of institutions. Poetry is an island that breaks away from the main.

Nothing ever stays the same, whether it be poems or humans.

Poetry involves the mysteries of the irrational perceived through rational words.

The world deprived of clear-cut outlines, of the up and the down, of good and evil, succumbs to a peculiar nihilization, that is, it loses its colors, so that grayness covers not only things of this earth and of space, but also the very flow of time, its minutes, days and years. Abstract considerations will be of little help, even if they are intended to bring relief. Poetry is quite different. By its very nature it says: All those theories are untrue. Since poetry deals with the singular, not hte general, it can't - if it is good poetry - look at things of this earth other than as colorful, variegated, and exciting, and so, it cannot reduce life, with all its pain, horror, suffering, and ecstasy, to a unified tonality of boredom or complaint. By necessity poetry is therefore on the side of being and against nothingness.

Every word is like an unnecessary stain on silence and nothingness.