"Thought, which has heretofore been more like a guide,/Emerges as a physical milestone, solid as ice,/As slippery and changing and prone to sudden cave-ins,/Voluptuous as desire itself and just as dangerous."

"We imitate in all our work our supposition that death is final."

"Human work consists of learning to remember. But first we must learn to allow that all of us -and everything-exists at the same time."

"It is yours only as much as you struggle to be with its demands."

"Our feeling is one of growing impoverishment."

"Are we tortured to hold to continued expectations from words? Still, if it doesn't feel holy in your hands, what is it?"

"As if to speak were to kill or die."

"An Apology for Exhaustion: The empty and unfulfilling quality of much contemporary poetry is its essential grandeur. Only in the poem and the dream does life face its duty to be poor."

"An identity is central to each destruction. The loss of boundaries of a word allows for a beginning."

"Its presence is known by a certain expectation that persists. The repetition of anticipation makes it real. This shadowed actuality has color, sound and form. These consist of memories These consist of the raw edge of wanting."

"Your thoughts are only shadows...They do not speak of me."

"So many things seeming so unnecessary, so unnecessary that they seem unreal."

"Is there an integrity in falling apart or acknowledging this aspect of things?"

"Things connect to make up a chain which becomes a line. The line is identity."

"Naming never knew. There is nothing anybody ever experienced that needed one."

"These poetry darts are meant to leave no time or opportunity for the listener to walk away unscathed."

"You had sought it as a reflection for your silence, a listening for the other, and it was not modern, and it was not enough that you bade them listen, crumpling your sheets into your thinking again and again, and then again sorting out the shiftings, the substitutions not so direct, the words with silent reverence for that which is beautiful, the reminders of what I could name. ANd now that I am I again, to hear my listening, can only again invoke the waves against my pain, not so beautiful, the lapping, not so beautiful the crashing, the holding a handful, the streaked sand backed up to my body, hovering against it, wanting to change it. Neither the ebbing light do I remember, nor the antique names for it, nor the colors I had prepared to imitate it, nor the enclosures within which I had embarked for it, patient, wearying."

"Without the actual 'thing' existence becomes unspecified, i.e. no 'individual experience.'"

"The poet strives to be an instrument of life, not of his or her own will."

"What the poet must invent and reinvent is not only poetry, but a raison d'être for poetry."

-Nick Piombino, Theoretical Objects