Of course newspaper sportswriting is mostly terrible - and of course it is usually the best writing in the paper.

The greatest kindness would put a bullet in his bright eye.

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

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

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.

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.

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.