Mere literary talent is common; what is rare is endurance, the continuing desire to work hard at writing.

Your presence in this house is almost as painful and enormous as your absence.

Baseball is continuous, like nothing else among American things, an endless game of repeated summers, joining the long generations of all the fathers and all the sons.

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.

If work is no antidote to death, nor a denial of it, death is a powerful stimulus to work. Get done what you can.

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.

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