The art of utterance persuades initially by its music and its rhythm, before semiotic or personal characteristics come into play.

You don’t read or overhear the voice in the poem, you are the voice in the poem.

Each poem leads you to the questions it makes sense to ask it.

I was unnerved to learn in my twenties that the poems of Emily Dickinson that I had memorized as a girl were not the poems as she had written them.

The non-artists among us are always terribly busy, but finally disappear without a trace.

I like art history and art criticism. Leo Steinberg has always been my favorite. Hes very original, very accurate and acute.

A poem needs imaginative rhythms as well as imaginative transformation of content.