I am not at all clear what free verse is anymore. That's one of the things you learn not to know.

History is one of those marvelous and necessary illusions we have to deal with. It's one of the ways of dealing with our world with impossible generalities which we couldn't live without.

Writing is like the relationship with your bowels. First you can, then you can't. Finally, you must. Only then should you reach for the paper.

Language is remarkable, except under the extreme constraints of mathematics and logic, it never can talk only about what it's supposed to talk about but is always spreading around.

I sometimes talk about the making of a poem within the poem.

I think there was a revolution in poetry, associated chiefly with Eliot and Pound; but maybe it is of the nature of revolutions or of the nature of history that their innovations should later come to look trivial or indistinguishable from technical tricks.

I've thought of the last line of some poems for years and tried them out, It wouldn't work because the last line was much too beautiful for the poem.