When I first heard Wallace Stevens voice, it was by chance: a friend wanted to listen to the recording he had made for the Harvard Vocarium Series.

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

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.

If you like the precision and concision of poetry, a page of prose is unsatisfying in a certain way. And poetry is so direct.

I do not give the honorific name of 'poetry' to the primitive and the unaccomplished.

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

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