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" A poem is among reading's slowest roads....What is it to have read a poem well? To have caught an allusion, admired a formal twist, heard a music in the silent tumble of letters on the page? How long does it take to read a poem, anyway? Such reading does not proceed in continuous, countable units of hours and days. It is a minute, minutes, here and there, intense and distracted, questing, between trips to the dictionary, and it consists in endless, endless repetition. There is a great deal less reading than reading where poems are concerned. A poem once read is the first note of a symphony, a toe dipped in the water, the first mouthful after a fast--necessary experiences all, with joys of their own, but still preludes. A poem comes into being by means of our repeated encounters with it, and each of these encounters must stay slow. It is hard to stay slow enough to keep pace with a poem. "
― , Books Promiscuously Read: Reading as a Way of Life
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" There is a radical acceptance of equivalence in poetic language, a willingness to see, say, and celebrate the fact that things are like other things, which are like other things in turn. Immersion in equivalences comes at a cost, however, to the human desire that certain things be totally unlike and distinguishable from other things. For example, we would prefer that innocence not look like guilt. We would prefer that violence, savagery, and waste be wholly, and obviously, distinct from creation, art, and fulfillment. This is not the way things work very often in life, or in poetry. "
― , Books Promiscuously Read: Reading as a Way of Life