Short stories amount for the most part to parlour tricks, party favours with built-in snappers, gadgets for including recognition and reversals

Both poet and painter want to reach the silence behind the language, the silence within the language. Both painter and poet want their work to shine not only in daylight but (by whatever illusionist magic) from within.

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

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

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 would talk in iambic pentameter if it were easier.

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.