Form is any aspect of a poem that encourages it to stay whole and not drift off into chaos.

I'm a line-maker. I think that's what makes poets different from prose-writers. That's the main way. We think, not just in sentences the way prose writers do but also in lines. So we're doing these two things at the same time.

Nationalism is a type of insanity in which the boundaries of a land replace God.

You, quote, find your voice, unquote, when you are able to invent this one character who resembles you, obviously, and probably is more like you than anyone else on earth, but is not the equivalent to you.

I started moving away from poets like Wallace Stevens and Hart Crane and started reading poets like, again, Karl Shapiro, Howard Nemerov, Philip Larkin, and the British poets who were imported through that important anthology put together by Alvarez - and those would include Thom Gunn and Ted Hughes. And I think these poets gave me assurance that there were other ways to write besides the rather involuted style of high modernism whose high priests were Pound, Eliot and Stevens, and Crane perhaps.

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.

I see all of us reading ourselves away from ourselves, straining in circles of light to find more light until the line of words becomes a trail of crumbs that we follow across a page of fresh snow.