"I think Ammons is a very great poet. I have a real quarrel with him, though... He's too rational for me. His poems proceed with a great, brilliant, rational mind. And for me... there's no peril in there. The irrational and the rational together make the kind of peril that gets enacted in poetry."

"Ammon's poetry combines three unique types of diction, the 'normal' range of poetic language; the demotic register(including folk-speech); and the Greek/Latin derived phraseology."

"Somewhere along the line, I don’t know just when, it seems to me I was able to manage the multifariousness of things and the unity of things so much more easily than I ever had before. I saw a continuous movement between the highest aspects of unity and the multiplicity of things, and it seemed to function so beautifully that I felt I could turn to any subject matter and know how to deal with it. I would know that there would be isolated facts and perceptions, that it would be possible to arrange them into propositions, and that these propositions could be included under a higher category of things — so that at some point there might be an almost contentless unity at the top of that sort of hierarchy. I feel that you don’t have to know everything to be a master of knowing, but you learn these procedures and then you can turn them toward any subject matter and they come out about the same. I don’t know when I saw for myself the mechanism of how it worked for me. Perhaps it was when I stopped using the word salient so much and began to use the word wikt:suasion."

"Poetry is everlasting. It is not going away. But it has never occupied a sizeable part of the world's business, and it never will."

"Artist should be left alone to paint or not to paint, write or not to write."

"THEIR SEX LIFE One failure on top of another"

"I’ve always been highly energized and have written poems in spurts. From the god-given first line right through the poem. And I don’t write two or three lines and then come back the next day and write two or three more; I write the whole poem at one sitting and then come back to it from time to time over the months or years and rework it."

"MIRRORMENT Birds are flowers flying and flowers perched birds."

"SMALL SONG The reeds give way to the wind and give the wind away"

"Unless I have something already moving through the mind, I don’t go to the typewriter at all. The world has so many poems in it, it has never seemed to me very smart to force one more upon the world. If there isn’t one there to write, you just leave it alone."

"Trying to make a living from poetry is like putting chains on butterfly wings."

"It’s never been such a good time to be a crook. In what other country of laws does one enjoy so much freedom to defraud one’s government and fellow citizens without having to worry about cops showing at the door? Small-time crooks sooner or later end up in the slammer, but our big-time con artists, as we’ve come to learn, are now regarded as the untouchables, too well-heeled and powerful to lock up."

"Widespread ignorance bordering on idiocy is our new national goal. ... The ideal citizen of a politically corrupt state, such as the one we now have, is a gullible dolt unable to tell truth from bullshit. An educated, well-informed population, the kind that a functioning democracy requires, would be difficult to lie to, and could not be led by the nose by the various vested interests running amok in this country."

"Should some senator or congressman have a sudden attack of conscience and blurt something out, “dark money” brings them to their senses and reminds them that their job is to facilitate the transfer of public funds into the pockets of the few and to not ask too many questions."

"I write for love, respect, money, fame, honor, redemption. I write to be included in a world I feel rejected by. But I don’t want to be included by surrendering myself to expectations. I want to buy my admission to others by engaging their interests and feelings, doing the least possible damage to my feelings and interests but changing theirs a bit. I think I was not aware early on of those things. I wrote early on because it was there to do and because if anything good happened in the poem I felt good. Poems are experiences as well as whatever else they are, and for me now, nothing, not respect, honor, money, seems as supportive as just having produced a body of work, which I hope is, all considered, good."

"CALLING Wind rocks the porch chair somebody home."

"In the long poem, if there is a single governing image at the center, then anything can fit around it, meanwhile allowing for a lot of fragmentation and discontinuity on the periphery. Short poems, for me, are coherences, single instances on the periphery of a nonspecified center. I revise short poems sometimes for years, whereas, since there is no getting lost in the long poem, I engage whatever comes up in the moment and link it with its moment."

"I couldn’t avoid being a poet. I was really having a pretty rough time of things, and I had a lot of energy, and poems were practically the only recourse I had to alleviate that energy and that anxiety. I take no credit for all the poems I’ve written. They were a way of releasing anxiety."

"[On inspiration]: I think it comes from anxiety. That is to say, either the mind or the body is already rather highly charged and in need of some kind of expression, some way to crystallize and relieve the pressure. And it seems to me that if you’re in that condition and an idea, an insight, an association occurs to you, then that energy is released through the expression of that insight or idea, and after the poem is written, you feel a certain resolution and calmness. Well, I won’t say a “momentary stay against confusion” (Robert Frost’s phrase) but that’s what I mean. I think it comes from that. You know, Bloom says somewhere that poetry is anxiety."

"the clock chimes, chimes, and stops but the river..."

"For William J. Higginson, haiku was a perfect rose, glistening with dew—and, in the latter half of the twentieth century, he was its foremost gardener."

"I believe haiku help us to see the world more clearly and haiku may be a useful therapy for all."

"Haiku can be the antidote against the kind of poetry dominated by egos and battling personalities."

"Small moments of natural wonder (as a youth), seemed to have prepared me to appreciate Japanese haiku."

"Haiku reading and writing can lead to a deeper understanding and appreciation of life and our environment."

"The arts have always transcended national boundaries as the haiku demonstrates."

"Poetry is a voicing, a calling forth, words waiting to be vocalized."

"Extract links Hirsch's 'Poets Glossary'"

"Hirsch's poems are compassionate , reverential , sometimes relievingly ruthless."

"Poetry is a form of necessary speech."

"Examples of Hirsch poems"

"The poet creates it; the people by recitation recreate it. Poet and reader (hearer) are moments of the same reality."

"The poem is an act beyond paraphrase because what is being said is always inseparable from the way it is being said."

"These ruinous days of Autumn.At dusk, the brightness seeps through the crumbling air, at dusk the air gathers up the brightness"

"The line is a way of thinking in poetry, by poetry..it paces the poem."

"I was never able to pray but let me inscribe my name in the book of waves."

"Inspiration is inbreathing, indwelling, poetry can never be entirely willed. It may be true a poet is given only a single line but that line is a gift from the unconscious, intution , a perception."

"Dear reader dearest inscrutable listener inscrutably harking or regrettably more likely not harking except in that chamber in me that posits you with me every moment I’m speaking or trying to speak"

"There is no true poetry unconcious inspiration."

"For most of history poetry has been an oral art, it retains the vestiges of orality, an experience embedded in the sensuality of sounds."

"The poem is an original and unique creation, but it is reading and recitation: participation."

"One crosses the brink of literalness into poetry by desiring , noticing, fixing on something and wondering what to make of it."

"'Poetic form' is a very deep matter that covers much more than phonological or typological pattern."

"Poetic form, as we know it, is an abstraction from, or residue of musical form.... The ghost of oral poetry never vanishes...all poetry was originally oral."

"The large (in English) unphilosophical, 'poetic' or 'religious' questions are elicited from their precise and technical microcosms."

"Poetry may be written on paper, but it’s an oral art.A good poem satisfies the ear .It creates a story or picture that grabs you."

"Contrastive stress is very important in English, as poems are full of invisible italicised contrasts of this kind."

"The study of rhetoric distinguishes between tropes, or figures of meaning such as metaphor and metonymy, and schemes, or surface patterns of words. Poetry is a matter of trope; and verse, of scheme or design."

"The blueprints of verse can be used to build things made of literal, or nonpoetic material, which is why most verse is not poetry."