I would talk in iambic pentameter if it were easier.

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.

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.

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

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

Robert Frost had always said you mustn't think of the last line first, or it's only a fake poem, not a real one. I'm inclined to agree.

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