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

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

You know how, when you fly from coast to coast on a really clear day, looking down from many miles up, you can see the little baseball diamonds everywhere? And every time I see a baseball diamond my heart goes out to it. And I think somewhere down there- I don't see any houses, I can hardly see any roads- but I know that people down there are playing the game we all love.

Baseball is fathers and sons. Football is brothers beating each other up in the backyard.

If the poet wants to be a poet, the poet must force the poet to revise. If the poet doesn't wish to revise, let the poet abandon poetry and take up stamp-collecting or real estate.

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

Less is more, in prose as in architecture.