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

Virtually every beginning poet hurts himself by an addiction to adjectives. Verbs are by far the most important things for poems-especially wonderful tough monosyllables like "gasp" and "cry." Nouns are the next most important. Adjectives tend to be useless.

You think that their dying is the worst thing that could happen. Then they stay dead.

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

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

But Blake's voices returned to dictate revisions.

To grow old is to lose everything. Aging, everybody knows it. Even when we are young, we glimpse it sometimes, and nod our heads when a grandfather dies. Then we row for years on the midsummer pond, ignorant and content.