Why are stamps adorned with kings and presidents? That we may lick their hinder parts and thump their heads.

I like all my children, even the squat and ugly ones.

When you write it doesn't occur to you that somebody could think different from what you do.

When I was starting to write, the great influence was T.S. Eliot and after that William Butler Yeats.

Robert Frost had always said you mustn't think of the last line first, or it's only a fake poem, not a real one. I'm inclined to agree.

I liked the kid who wrote me that he had to do a term paper on a modern poet and he was doing me because, though they say you have to read poems twice, he found he could handle mine in one try.

I never abandoned either forms or freedom. I imagine that most of what could be called free verse is in my first book. I got through that fairly early.