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

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.

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.

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

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

Words seem like drops of water in a stream that has its own wholeness and its own motion.

We made in those days tiny identical rooms inside our bodies which the men who uncover our graves will find in a thousand years shining and whole.