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

Of course newspaper sportswriting is mostly terrible - and of course it is usually the best writing in the paper.

If the poet wants to be a poet, the poet must force the poet to revise. If the poet doesn't wish to revise, let the poet abandon poetry and take up stamp-collecting or real estate.

But Blake's voices returned to dictate revisions.

I don't know where a poem comes from until after I've lived with it a long time. I've a notion that a poem comes from absolutely everything that every happened to you.

Today when I begin writing I’m aware: something that I don’t understand drives this engine.

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