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.

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

[T]eaching has been for me an education (Lord knows what it has been for my students).

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

Till I, high in the tower of my time Among familiar ruins, began to cry For accident, sickness, justice, war and crime, Because all died, because I had to die. The snow fell, the trees stood, the promise kept, And a child I slept.

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.

A teacher is a person who never says anything once.