Occasionally a student writer comes up with something really beautiful and moving, and you won't know for years if it was an accident or the first burst of something wonderful.

I've never read a political poem that's accomplished anything. Poetry makes things happen, but rarely what the poet wants.

The nice thing about the Bible is it doesn't give you too many facts. Two an a half lines and it tells you the whole story and that leaves you a great deal of freedom to elaborate on how it might have happened.

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

I would talk in iambic pentameter if it were easier.

I have a plot, but not much happens.

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.