I liked teaching Henry James. When you look down at a Henry James novel from a helicopter height, you find an intricate spider web that all clings together.

One could say that artists are people who think naturally in highly patterned ways.

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

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.

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.

There are not many poets whose fame rests on a single work.