The future happens. No matter how much we scream.

Americans are not brought up with meter. They're not brought up with poetry. If you try to get them to recite, they're too embarrassed.

I read; I travel; I become

I have never separated the writing of poetry from prayer. I have grown up believing it is a vocation, a religious vocation.

Time is the metre, memory the only plot.

The personal vocabulary, the individual melody whose metre is one's biography, joins in that sound, with any luck, and the body moves like a walking, a waking island.

We make too much of that long groan which underlines the past.