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

We made in those days tiny identical rooms inside our bodies which the men who uncover our graves will find in a thousand years shining and whole.

Baseball, because of its continuity over the space of America and the time of America, is a place where memory gathers.

But Blake's voices returned to dictate revisions.

Each year the big garden grew smaller and Jane - who grew flowers by choice, not corn or stringbeans - worked at the vegetables more than I did. Each winter I dreamed crops, dreamed marvels of canning . . . and each summer I largely failed. Shamefaced, I planted no garden at all.

I wish you were that birch rising from the clump behind you, and I the gray oak alongside.

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