If our goal is to write poetry, the only way we are likely to be any good is to try to be as great as the best.
Opposites are attracted when each one is anxious about its own character.
You think that their dying is the worst thing that could happen. Then they stay dead.
In football they measure forty-yard sprints. Nobody runs forty yards in basketball. Maybe you run the ninety-four feet of the court; then you stop, not on a dime, but on Miss Liberty's torch. In football you run over somebody's face.
The form of free verse is as binding and as liberating as the form of a rondeau.
Poetry is what I've done my whole life. And every important thing in my life had found itself into poems.