A teacher is a person who never says anything once.

A lot happens by accident in poetry.

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

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

History is where tensions were.

For a Jewish Puritan of the middle class, the novel is serious, the novel is work, the novel is conscientious application why, the novel is practically the retail business all over again.