The pleasure we feel, reading a poem, is our assurance of its integrity.

I see no reason to spend your life writing poems unless your goal is to write great poems.

I want to sleep like the birds then wake to write you again without hope that you read me.

When we put words together - adjective with noun, noun with verb, verb with object - we start to talk to each other.

Joe DiMaggio batting sometimes gave the impression, the suggestion that the old rules and dimensions of baseball no longer applied to him, and that the game had at last grown unfairly easy.

Work is style, and there is style without thought; not in theory, only in fact. When I take a sentence in my hand, raise it to the light, rub my hand across it, disjoin it, put it back together again with a comma added, raising the pitch in the front part; when I rub the grain of it, comb the fur of it, re-assemble the bones of it, I am making something that carries with it the sound of a voice, the firmness of a hand. Maybe little more.

The form of free verse is as binding and as liberating as the form of a rondeau.