Carolyn Kizer quotes:

A poet, to whom no one cruel and imposing listens, / Disdained by senates, whispers to your dust,

You write for the people in high school who ignored you. We all do.

Poets are interested mostly in death and commas.

I happen to believe that there are a lot of good poets around at present, but a poet like Alex Kuo, who possesses a highly developed moral sense and a bitter honesty, is rare at any time and especially in this time. We need him.

She tended to be impatient with that sort of intellectual who, for all his brilliance, has never been able to arrive at the simple conclusion that to be reasonably happy you have to be reasonably good.

You cannot meet someone for a moment, or even cast eyes on someone in the street, without changing. That is my subject.

Poems, to me, do not come from ideas, they come from a series of images that you tuck away in the back of your brain. Little photographic snapshots. Then you get the major vision of the poem, which is like a giant magnet to which all these disparate little impressions fly and adhere, and there is the poem!

We live in wonder, blaze in a cycle of passion and apprehension.

He said, "You have pigs in this poem; pigs are not poetic." I got up and walked out of that class and never went back.

Our masks, always in peril of smearing or cracking, in need of continuous check in the mirror or silverware, keep us in thrall to ourselves, concerned with our surfaces.

What is so marvelous about living today is that it is possible to extend, like a flower, spreading petals in all directions.