"A poem conveys not a message so much as the provenance of a message, an advent of sense."

"No art form points like poetry to this originality of language as to its essential and abiding concern."

"Experience has ceded to a series of happenings, about which the most we can expect is information."

"A jacket commemorating the Germans as champions of the 1990 World Cup is out of date two weeks after the event has passed."

"In an age where history is recorded on T-shirts, the very notion of dwelling on the deep structure of an experience has come to appear both arcane and archaic."

"Most film directors do not come up with their own subjects or write their own screenplays."

"Still the question remains of what actually speaks in a poem, if not subjectivity as historically constructed."

"Unlike metaphor, metonymy does not try to fuse images together."

"To liberate words means first to shatter their function as vehicles of idea, memory, hope, or regret."

"With the question of the effect of a poem, the topic of investigation shifts from that of textual autonomy to textual reception - to the issue of what we actually look for or find in reading a poem."