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

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

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.

I see no reason to spend your life writing poems unless your goal is to write great poems.

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.

Less is more, in prose as in architecture.