Opposites are attracted when each one is anxious about its own character.

Horace, when he wrote the Ars Poetica, recommended that poets keep their poems home for ten years; don't let them go, don't publish them until you have kept them around for ten years: by that time, they ought to stop moving on you; by that time, you ought to have them right.

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

Poetry is what I've done my whole life. And every important thing in my life had found itself into poems.

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 greatest kindness would put a bullet in his bright eye.

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