You think that their dying is the worst thing that could happen. Then they stay dead.

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.

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.

To grow old is to lose everything. Aging, everybody knows it. Even when we are young, we glimpse it sometimes, and nod our heads when a grandfather dies. Then we row for years on the midsummer pond, ignorant and content.

You think that their dying is the worst thing that could happen. Then they stay dead.

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

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.