I would keep in mind to a young poet that you are entering into something that is very important, that has always been important in terms of human concerns.

I guess that would have been 1968. I was a freshman in college and I wasn't writing good poems, but I was at least trying to write poems then.

The way to become a poet is to read poetry and to imitate what you read and to read passionately and widely and in as involved a way as you can.

Cafeteria-style education, combined with the unwillingness of our schools to place demands on students, has resulted in a steady diminishment of commonly shared information between generations and between young people themselves.

As a reader you have a task to do, you have something to do. You bring your experience to it. It's not all inherit in the poem.

A poem is a hand, a hook, a prayer. It is a soul in action.

I was once doing a question and answer period with the novelist Jane Smiley in a bookstore and someone asked us what our processes were and Jane said hers and then I said mine and Jane said, "Well, if I had a student like that I'd force him never to write like that again because you could never write a novel in the way that you write poetry."