While the novelist is banging on his typewriter, the poet is watching a fly in the windowpane.

There are interesting forms of difficulty, and there are unprofitable forms of difficulty. I mean, I enjoy some difficult poetry, but some of it is impenetrable and I actually wouldn't want to penetrate it if I could, perhaps.

But tonight, the lion of contentment has placed a warm heavy paw on my chest.

I was a pretty happy kid, I had to fake it. I had to get into this miserable character before I wrote poems.

It's a good thing to get poetry off the shelves and more into public life.

Particularly when I thought of myself as a Wallace Stevens acolyte, I wrote very difficult poetry and I was really guilty of not knowing what I was talking about. I was going for a kind of clever verbal effect. I was trying to sound linguistically or verbally interesting. I had a sense, I guess, from just reading a lot of poetry of how a poem would start and how it would end but really I didn't know what I was doing. It had very little connection to my life.

Poetry is like standing on the edge of a lake on a moonlit night and the light of the moon is always pointing straight at you.