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

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.

Each year the big garden grew smaller and Jane - who grew flowers by choice, not corn or stringbeans - worked at the vegetables more than I did. Each winter I dreamed crops, dreamed marvels of canning . . . and each summer I largely failed. Shamefaced, I planted no garden at all.

Opposites are attracted when each one is anxious about its own character.

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.

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

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