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

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.

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.

When modern writers gave up telling stories, they gave up the greatest thing we had.

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

Mostly the thought and the verse come inseparably. In my poem Poetics, it's as close as I come to telling how I do it.