To write poetry is to be very alone, but you always have the company of your influences. But you also have the company of the form itself, which has a kind of consciousness. I mean, the sonnet will simply tell you, that's too many syllables or that's too many lines or that's the wrong place. So, instead of being alone, you're in dialogue with the form.

High School is the place where poetry goes to die.

There's a lot of unconscious activity that goes on I think in the composition of a poem.

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.

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

Poems are not easy to start, and they're not easy to finish. There's a great pleasure in - I wouldn't say ease, but maybe kind of a fascinated ease that accompanies the actual writing of the poem. I find it very difficult to get started.

The literary world is so full of pretension, and there's such an enormous gap between how seriously poets take themselves and how widely they're ignored by everybody else.