I thought it again, and again later, when buying a hairbrush: This is it. Parking. Slamming the car door shut in the cold. What you called that yearning.

“I like to make the reader laugh—and then steal that laugh, right out of the throat,” he said. “Because I think life is like that, tragedy right alongside humor.”

But the essential advantage for a poet is not to have a beautiful world with which to deal: it is to be able to see beneath both beauty and ugliness; to see the boredom, and the horror, and the glory. T. S. Eliot

The Italian poet who speaks of him reminds us of the urgent need for poetry. Poetry, he suggests, is what Bruno thought at the extreme point of death but could never express.

He read as a poet reads—avidly, intuitively, unreasonably.

“Poetry is a principle of power invoked by all of us against our vanishing.”

“Though you’ve never seen it before, it must be a town you’ve lived in all your life.”

“The poem is always in your hometown,” he explained, “but you have a better chance of finding it in another.”

“death as a theme always produces a self-portrait.”