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

When Robert Frost was alive, I was known as the other new England poet, which is to be barely known at all.

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

I do insist on making what I hope is sense so there's always a coherent narrative or argument that the reader can follow.

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.