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

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

Words seem like drops of water in a stream that has its own wholeness and its own motion.

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

For most baseball fans, maybe oldest is always best. We love baseball because it seizes and retains the past, like the snowy village inside a glass paperweight.

To desire to write poems that endure-we undertake such a goal certain of two things: that in all likelihood we will fail, and if we succeed we will never know it

Virtually every beginning poet hurts himself by an addiction to adjectives. Verbs are by far the most important things for poems-especially wonderful tough monosyllables like "gasp" and "cry." Nouns are the next most important. Adjectives tend to be useless.