I don't know where a poem comes from until after I've lived with it a long time. I've a notion that a poem comes from absolutely everything that every happened to you.

Of course newspaper sportswriting is mostly terrible - and of course it is usually the best writing in the paper.

I want to sleep like the birds then wake to write you again without hope that you read me.

The pleasure we feel, reading a poem, is our assurance of its integrity.

But Blake's voices returned to dictate revisions.

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.

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