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.

Some of us are darkness lovers. We do not dislike the early and late daylight of June, but we cherish the increasing dark of November, which we wrap around ourselves in the prosperous warmth of wood stove, oil and electric blanket. Inside our warmth we fold ourselves, partly tuber, partly bear, in the dark and its cold - around us, outside us, safely away from us. We tuck ourselves up in the comfort of cold's opposite, warming ourslves by thought of the cold, lighting ourselves by darkness's idea.

To desire to write poems that endure-we undertake such a goal certain of two things: that in all likelihood we will fail, and if we succeed we will never know it

In football they measure forty-yard sprints. Nobody runs forty yards in basketball. Maybe you run the ninety-four feet of the court; then you stop, not on a dime, but on Miss Liberty's torch. In football you run over somebody's face.

Today when I begin writing I’m aware: something that I don’t understand drives this engine.

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

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.