No need to fear death. There will be a tunnel and light.

You remember too much," my mother said to me recently. "Why hold onto all that?" And I said, "where can I put it down?

There are different gradations of personhood in different poems. Some of them seem far away from me and some up close, and the up-close ones generally don't say what I want them to say. And that's true of the persona in the poem who's lamenting this as a fact of a certain stage of life. But it's also true of me as me.

When I began to be published, people got the idea that I should 'teach writing,' which I have no idea how to do and don't really believe in.

He came after Homer and before Gertrude Stein, a difficult interval for a poet.

We are only midway through the central verse of our youth when we see ourselves begin to blacken. ... We had been seduced into thinking that we were immortal and suddenly the affair is over.

Those nights lying alone are not discontinuous with this cold hectic dawn. It is who I am.